The conditional tense in Peninsular Ibero-Romance

The conditional tense in the Ibero-Romance conveys both temporal and modal values. In this article, I aim to account for its validity in the vernaculars of the Iberian Peninsula as well as to compare its current usage to the one it exhibited one century ago. In order to do so, I have taken out data from five current sociolinguistic corpora plus the Linguistic Atlas of the Iberian Peninsula. The results show a dramatic evolution in the employment of the conditional tense, led by Spanish and Portuguese, which have turned the conditional tense into a morphological marker of evidentiality. In contrast, Galician and Catalan maintain modal uses that are not related to evidential ones. Furthermore, my analysis demonstrates that the temporal reading is minor and every now and then non-existent in most of the Iberian Peninsula, as suggested by the data from one century ago.