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Deber is the predominant meaning of "should" today, but it is not the only meaning. Like most modals it has an epistemic meaning (about our knowledge of the world) as well as a deontic one (about ho …

"Subjunctive" refers to a set of endings for verbs in various languages. It is nearly obsolete in English, but God bless America. is one of the surviving examples. "Bless" is subjunctive there. …

This is an area where usage has been changing, and may still be changing. Many people use the subjunctive form after verbs that demand or suggest: demand, insist, recommend, advise, require; but oth …

It's an archaic construction, inverting the verb and the subject, and using the (nearly obsolete) subjunctive form of the verb, to convey a conditional. It survives much more in the past (where, apart …

Your last example - an indirect command or request - is quite common in formal contexts, such as minutes of meetings, and even in speech for some speakers, though many would say "that he files". The …

It is strange that he be angry is an archaic use of the "present subjunctive" which is rare in modern English, and almost obsolete in this context. It is strange that he have failed is parallel: a p …

Became is the past (historically, the "past subjunctive", but that is different for precisely one word in the language: were vs was). It is normally used for counterfactual conditionals, like yours. S …

"Had we lived" is the (literary) inversion that means the same as "if we had lived". "I should have" is the form that careful writers of his generation (and later ones, but few today) would write, w …

Insofar as Modern English has a past subjunctive (it differs from the past in precisely one word in the entire language: "were" vs. "was"), both "had" and "were to have" are subjunctive, and both are …

Because walking down the street is something that you can (probably) do, they are interchangeable. But if the antecedent is something that you could not practically do, the first becomes incoherent: …

Part of the answer is that the subjunctive ended up with almost no functional load. In most of its uses it is distinguished syntactically from other constructions, so morphological distinction is red …

"Could" here acts as a "buffer word" - a word which is not grammatically necessary, but which adds a sort of tentative quality, which softens the request and makes it feel more polite. It could be r …

All are possible, and the difference is one of focus rather than objective fact. The first variants (1; 1') imply that the issue still exists in the present; the second do not imply that, but neither …

"Recommend that they are" has been occurring increasingly since 1950, but is still far less common than "Recommend that they be": See this ngram: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=recommend …