How is the English Subjunctive Composed? [closed]

Yesterday, I read about the English subjunctive mood. I tried to, but couldn't, discern a concise conception of it.

What do you regard as a useful and concise conception of the subjunctive mood?

Solution 1:

In response to the originally posed question, John Lawler wrote a somewhat amusing, (pedantically) accurate, but highly confusing comment, one which I feel deserves translation and further elaboration into something more resembling an actual answer. John said:

A useful and concise conception of the English subjunctive mood is that it is a mythical beast, like the fairies at the bottom of the garden in summer. English has no subjunctive mood, though Latin did and many European languages (Spanish, German, French, etc) do have a subjunctive mood. But English teachers talk about it all the time, and often have faith that it exists; just like fairies. In fact, though, as you’ve discovered, there is no simple description; there is only a name and a lot of vague hand-waving about “conditional” and “hypothetical”, like they were detectable.

What I believe John meant (and he is free to correct me) is that English no longer uses a special inflection for subjunctive situations which viewed in perfect isolation is clearly distinct from a bare unmarked infinitive, or uniquely with were-hypotheticals from an otherwise normal (albeit plural-looking) indicative inflection.

This stands in contrast to the situation in Latin and its descendants, and often in other Indo-European languages as well, where one can always distinguish an indicative from a subjunctive because of those respective tongues’ rich inflectional morphologies. For example:

• Latin example: Starting with amare, compare 3sg present indicative amat with 3sg present subjunctive amet.
• Spanish example: Starting with amar, compare 3sg present indicative ama with 3sg present subjunctive subjunctive ame.
• French example: We can’t here use the obvious cognate aimer for our demo, because French no longer has a 3sg present ind/subj distinction there. Instead we will start with venir, where we can compare a 3sg present indicative vient with 3sg present subjunctive vienne.

The French aimer (and indeed, most regular French verbs) presents us with an interesting situation: a special subjunctive inflection is seen only in the 1st and 2nd person plurals (for which it “borrows” the corresponding imperfect indicative form, rather quite oddly enough), not in singulars or in the 3pl.

Does that mean that French no longer has a subjunctive for verbs like aimer where all forms of the French present subjunctive look just like either present indicatives or else just like imperfects. In John’s framework, I suspect that it indeed may not. I also suspect he’d never get a native French speaker to agree with him on this point.

I bring up the French case because there are some parallels with what has happened with English. But while French has lost a few of its distinctions and inflections, English has lost almost all of its original inflectional morphology all across the board, including the entire subjunctive set sauf for one unique situation alone.

So in the restricted sense that other languages have these specially inflected verb forms for the subjunctive that look nothing like their corresponding indicatives, no, English does not have that. John is 100% correct in this. But it is in a specific domain and not the one that most people coming here looking for answers are used to operating in.

Nonetheless, English has maintained a distinction between a normal indicative and an unmarked form in the 3sg case (the only place we ever make a present indicative inflection change), a distinction it makes for many of the same situations that in other languages have a mandatory inflection change.

This is easily demonstrated with the minimal semantic pair:

• I insist that she is here.
  (Meaning: she is really here, and I am affirming that)
• I insist that she be here.
  (Meaning: she is not here, and I am demanding her attendance, or to subjunctivize it, I am demanding that she attend)

So English does, in certain particular situations, make a distinction between the form used for subordinate clauses in a simple indicative statement of fact on the one hand, and the form used in counter-factual situations on the other. This is what people are talking about when they talk about “the subjunctive” in English. But it is a wholly invariant distinction that looks exactly like the unmarked infinitive such as one would use with a modal auxiliary. And that’s why John says it is not a subjunctive.

Note how this is more change than French experiences for the majority of its 3sg cases in a clause requiring the subjunctive — after all, they use the very same word as in the indicative while we do not — and they would never stop calling it a subjunctive construction.

The odd man out in all this is were for hypotheticals. This is where the other languages I’ve mentioned (sometimes) use a special inflection that there they refer to as something like a “past subjunctive”. For example, those are “l’imparfait du subjonctif” in French (now almost exclusively a “literary” inflection, not a spoken one) and “el (pretérito) imperfecto del subjuntivo” in Spanish.

The thing is, in most of these other languages, they automatically backshift a present subjunctive to a past one when relating past events. But in English we never do that. That’s not what our were form is for. This special form is not a simple shift from present to past, since in English going from the main clause being in the present indicative

• I demand that she be here.

to being in the past indicative

• I demanded that she be here.

sees no change in the subordinate clause’s verb, only in the main one’s. In the other languages, it doesn’t typically work that way. So be and were do not oppose each other in the way many other languages’ subjunctive forms typically do.

Only in the most archaically stilted of examples, or ancient ones, can one ever find a tense shift from present to past in an English subjunctive clause. And even there it may be a learnèd import from other languages. English has never had a tense shift in the subjunctive in quite the same way as Latin and its descendants do.

However, we in English do use — as a unique and isolated case — the special form were for hypotheticals. This is another place besides back-shifting where neighboring languages also use a past subjunctive: they used it for hypotheticals.

So when people speak of a past subjunctive in English, they are talking solely about an “If only it were so!” or an “If I were you” type of hypothetical, never a back-shifted present subjunctive.

It’s easy to see why some people continue to call this a “past subjunctive” in English: that’s what the Old English past subjunctive form indeed was:

Or at least, that’s where our use of were comes from. Notice the past subjunctive wǣre for singular and wǣren for plural. If one concedes that Old English wǣre turned into Modern English were, and I rather think one must, then it becomes clear that we use were now just as we ever did. It is the same verb, and the same inflection, and for the most part, the same rules, as we have always used for these situations.

Considering how were inarguably started out as a past subjunctive back in its wǣre days, it should be no surprise that some people still call it that same thing today — even if that term may seem misleading to certain other folks.

It really all depends on where you’re coming from.

Additionally, if you look closely at the Old English inflection table above, you can all see where we came from for using be as a present subjunctive, and in the plural it was indeed identical to the infinitive. The situations where we use special forms haven’t changed as much as people would have one believe.

It is just this sort of diachronic analysis that can lead a person to speak of “English subjunctive forms”: the forms we still (sometimes) use today are historically linked directly back to the original, richer inflectional morphology in the Old English.

However, when examined under the light of synchronic analysis (which I presume is what John is doing here), the subjunctive picture blurs into something unrecognizable at best, and arguably even disappears altogether. Children of English-speaking parents do not learn a table of special inflections of subjunctive forms the way children of Romance speakers eventually do. That’s because English has no such thing.

So even though English once upon a time had special subjunctive inflections for certain situations (although it no longer does), and just because some speakers and writers maintain some of those same distinctions today unconsciously, it is imperative that one never attempt to mindlessly apply Latinate rules of where to use a present or past subjunctive into any form of English, not even in Old English.

That’s because English has never precisely followed those same rules. If you take some time to read through the copious textual examples regarding all this in the second volume of F.T. Visser’s monumental An Historical Syntax of the English Language, where the author gives OE, MidE, and ModE examples of what he calls a “modally marked form”, you will see that even a thousand years ago English marched to the beat of its own drum, not Rome’s, and that there was even then variation in writers’ choices.

I’ve answered a lot of subjunctive questions here. I might also recommend these other answers of mine for further, somewhat lighter reading:

• “If I were him, I would doubt if she (is/was/were?) serious about this relationship”
• “Be them” or “be they”?, which somewhat colorfully shows fossil uses.
• Past Conditional Statements
• Why is American English so wedded to the subjunctive?

Solution 2:

The subjunctive mood expresses a hypothetical or counterfactual condition. It is perhaps best understood by looking at the difference between if I were (past subjunctive) and if I was (past indicative).

If I were a carpenter and you were a lady, would you marry me anyway?

The speaker is not a carpenter, but is posing a hypothetical scenario that supposes that he is a carpenter, and is asking a question based on that hypothetical scenario. (Note that was is often used in place of were these days, and with increasing acceptance from linguists. However, this does not change the fundamental nature of the subjunctive.)

If I was rude to you yesterday, I apologize.

This is also a conditional, but it is not based on a hypothetical scenario: either the speaker was rude in the past, in which case he apologizes, or he was not—in which case there is no need for an apology. (Could you use "If I was a carpenter" as past indicative? Possibly—if you've lost your memory and do not remember whether you did or did not work as a carpenter in the past.)

Understanding the difference between the two will help you explore the subjunctive further.