Professor Dave again, let’s learn the pluperfect subjunctive tense.
I know you are probably sick and tired of the subjunctive mood by now, but don’t worry,
there is just one more tense to learn, and if we remember the imperfect subjunctive,
this will be a pretty simple one.
This is the pluperfect subjunctive, also known as trapassato congiuntivo, implying more past
than the past.
To understand when this is used, let’s recall that when the main clause uses a primary tense,
the dependent clause can be in one of two tenses.
If the two actions are contemporaneous, we will use the present.
If the action in the dependent clause happens before the action in the main clause, we use
the past subjunctive.
Now let’s switch gears and look at what happens when we have a main clause with a
secondary, or historical tense.
Once again we can have the possibility of having a dependent clause with contemporaneous
action, or prior action.
Fortunately we have another tense up our sleeve, the pluperfect subjunctive, or trapassato congiuntivo.
Just like the pluperfect indicative, this tense describes an action that is more in
the past than another action that is already in the past, and this is exactly what we need
here, but simply in the subjunctive mood, so we use pluperfect subjunctive rather than
pluperfect indicative.
Trapassato is a compound tense, and just like the passato, it is formed with the auxiliary
verb, either avere or essere, in the subjunctive mood, which will be the imperfect subjunctive
we already learned, followed by the past participle.
If you need to review the rules for the past participle, go back to our lesson on passato
prossimo, as those rules will still apply for trapassato congiuntivo.
We will simply be using the participle with the imperfect subjunctive instead.
Let’s conjugate two verbs through trapassato congiuntivo now, starting with parlare.
So as we said, for all of these, the auxiliary verb, either avere or essere, is conjugated
into imperfect subjunctive, so recall that only first and second person singular look the same.
And then, we must recall that when the auxiliary verb is avere, we don’t have to worry about
the participle agreeing with the verb, unless a direct object pronoun precedes the verb,
but if the auxiliary verb is essere, then there must be an agreement in number and gender,
hence the different endings we just saw when conjugating andare.
Let’s look at just a couple examples to cement things a little further.
And with that, we are finally done with the subjunctive mood.
We had to learn four tenses, special cases, and the sequence of tenses, but if you can
get comfortable with all of these, you will absolutely sound like a convincing native
Italian speaker, as even Italians sometimes have trouble keeping all of these tenses straight.
To truly finish things off, let’s check comprehension.