Timeline for subjunctive in a "non-if" hypothetical clause
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 15, 2016 at 3:40 | history | protected | tchrist♦ | ||
| Jul 24, 2016 at 23:37 | comment | added | Peter Shor | @jlovegren: when dealing with subjunctives in Early Modern English (which is presumably what we're doing here, because to me the sentence is clearly ungrammatical in contemporary English), dividing them into subjunctive and irrealis doesn't make any sense. There was a broad range of subjunctive forms in use then, most of which have died out, leaving in contemporary English two isolated islands which Pullum calls irrealis and subjunctive. | |
| Jul 24, 2016 at 22:27 | comment | added | user31341 | @JanusBahsJacquet to clarify, I meant the labels as syntactic categories following Huddleston & Pullum's grammar. For example, English has many ways of expressing irrealis modality, but only one verb form (restricted to the copula) labeled "irrealis" in H&P's treatment. As for "subjunctive", the term is not widely used by typologists because it refers to a particular set of syntactic and semantic properties in European languages. | |
| Jul 24, 2016 at 21:18 | answer | added | tchrist♦ | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jul 24, 2016 at 20:40 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @jlovegren That’s just a matter of how you systemise English verbal categories. I’d say that to the majority of people (myself included), were here is just as subjunctive as be in your example; it’s just past rather than present (and if you ask John Lawler on the other edge of the fence, there is no such concept as subjunctive in English at all). I don’t see any compelling reason to believe that subjunctive mood and irrealis modality in English are incompatible. | |
| Jul 24, 2016 at 17:46 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackEnglish/status/757270729771642881 | ||
| Jul 24, 2016 at 17:44 | comment | added | rhetorician | @jlovegren: Impressive! | |
| Jul 24, 2016 at 17:31 | comment | added | user31341 | The usages in your first two sentences are irrealis and modal preterite, respectively. Subjunctive form would be be ("Far be it from me to..."). | |
| Jul 24, 2016 at 17:30 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | This is a grammatical but somewhat old-fashioned usage these days. It reminds me of Romance constructions in which such things occur. If you want documentation for it in English, I would look in Visser. He should also mention its history and currency. | |
| Jul 24, 2016 at 17:29 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 43 characters in body; edited tags
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| Jul 24, 2016 at 7:19 | comment | added | KWinker | Yes, to me, too--a good reason to stick to normal usage. But this is a common and confusing issue, likely in transition in English. "If I were..." is probably correct (and, yes, "Were I..." or "Were [s]he..."), but replacement by "was" is even replacing these accepted norms. An interesting suggestion is to use "were" when discussing non-factual cases and "was" when not. | |
| Jul 12, 2016 at 22:06 | review | First posts | |||
| Jul 12, 2016 at 23:46 | |||||
| Jul 12, 2016 at 22:04 | history | asked | Jonathan Jackson | CC BY-SA 3.0 |