Approach to the use of the Epistemic Conditional in Spanish: tense, Modality and Teaching

Abstract

In this paper, we would like to study the so-called Epistemic Conditional in Spanish (Juan en aquella época tendría unos 40 años) and stress on the difficulty for French students, to understand and use it, since French does not have a conditional form to express the past probability. The proposal is that epistemic conditional refer to a simultaneous or a past situation with respect to the Speaker. It allows for a necessity modal meaning (Juan probablemente tenía 40 años), by a metaphorical meaning: given what the Speaker knows in the past, and the evidence he has, the situation is necessary, i.e., and must occur in his future. The necessity modal operator is not anchored to present speech time but to a past time. In the last part, we will show that, if we translate ‘literally’ the Epistemic Conditional into French, we can obtain a conjecture conditional, a journalistic conditional or a hypothetical conditional, with a present or future anchor, but not a past one. This analysis may contribute to the hypothesis that Spanish Conditional still has a past component, which comes from its etymology, whereas the French Conditional lacks it.