...dijo, justo antes de que se definiera su adversario...
...se definió, justo después de que Obama dijera/dijo...
antes de
las 8
después de
las 10
a thing
antes d
el amanecer
después de
las campanadas
a thing
antes de
que definiera
después de
que comprara
a thing
conjunction that tell that you must parse the following part and how to do it
If you want to use as a temporal reference something stronger than "a thing", sort of "verbal thingamajig" constructed using subjunctive, well, you may use indicative to liven it up and say, for instance, that the
latter could be the cause of first one:
"se definió justo después de que Obama dijo"
or that there's some sort of curious coincedence there:
"se definió justo después de que Obama dijo"
or there's some sort of irony:
"se definió justo después de que Obama dijo"
The indicative-subjunctive dipole is not strong enough to carry any of those unambiguously, but you automatically know that by using subjunctive the speaker only wanted to sort out related or unrelated events, using one as a reference for the other. With indicative, something stronger is suggested.
Is there some cases of "antes de " that the speakers would like to liven up using indicative? Well, sure they would, but both verbs collide while using
pretérito indefinido because of, which one carries the perfective aspect?
"dijo justo antes de que se definió"
dijo or
se definió? which one is happening and done within the scope of that phrase (not the reality described by that phrase, not within the possible chain of events)?
dijo keeps the perfective aspect and
definir must take imperfect but, which one? Imperfect indicative ("dijo justo antes de que se definía
") describes something without caring about its beginning and end. How can it be the temporal reference for another action with precise timing?
It must be imperfect subjunctive as -like every subjunctive- it takes the action out of the scope of "actioning" and present it as something different, a temporal reference in this case.
About Latin, it's Greek to me, and regarding to German, as I barely remember from my 6 years of it in School -failing miserably to learn it-, it combines features of conditional and subjunctive together, so it becomes much more prone to deal with hypothetical and causal issues -as I think to remember-.
Finally, Spanish is very logical until you try to apply to it an alien logic, then it looks Martian
