Professor Dave again, let’s look at the sequence of tenses.
We have learned a lot about the subjunctive mood and when to use it, in both the present
tense and the past tense.
So now we need to learn about the sequence of tenses, or concordanza dei tempi.
We already know that the chronology of an event is established by the tense being used
in the main clause.
Now we are going to study the variation of tenses in a subordinate clause.
This means we are going to examine the correlation between an action described in the dependent
clause and the verb of the main clause.
In general, we could find three different possibilities.
First, we might find that the two actions are happening at the same time.
This is called contemporaneity of action.
This would be something like: I believe they are here.
You are currently believing, and if you are correct, they are currently here.
Next, we could find that the action in the subordinate clause has happened before the
main clause.
This is called priority, or anteriority of action.
This would be something like: I believe they were here.
You are currently believing, and if you are correct they were here before this moment
that you are believing.
And lastly, we might find that the action in the subordinate clause happens later than
the action in the main clause.
This is called posteriority of action.
This would be something like: I believe they will be here.
But we can lose this one, because the subjunctive mood does not have a future tense, so we will
just focus on contemporaneity and priority.
However, we do have to worry about the tense in the main clause.
This tense will trigger our choice of tenses in the subjunctive.
Let’s understand that there are primary tenses, which are the present, future, and
imperative.
And there are also secondary, or historical tenses, which are the imperfect, passato prossimo,
trapassato prossimo, passato remoto, condizionale presente, and condizionale passato.
Let’s see how this works with each tense, using the reflexive verb assicurarsi, which
means to make sure.
Being able to identify tenses as being primary or secondary will be very important, because
this will affect the subordinate clause.
When the main clause uses a primary tense, only present and past subjunctive can be used
for the dependent clause.
When the main clause uses a secondary tense, only imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive
can be used.
I know that sounds complicated, but as with everything else, let’s just go through some
examples and things will make more sense.
First, looking at contemporaneous action, with a main clause that uses a primary tense.
Remember, this means we can have a dependent clause with present subjunctive.
Now let’s rewrite these same sentences using the past subjunctive.
Now let’s look at contemporaneous action with a main clause that uses a secondary tense.
This will allow us to use the imperfect subjunctive, so let’s use the
imperfect here.
Lastly, let’s move away from contemporaneity and look at priority, or anteriority.
Remember, this is where the action in the dependent clause happens before the action
in the main clause.
Here there are many possibilities for the tense in the dependent clause, so let’s
just use imperfect here.
And that’s it for the dreaded series of tenses.