The English subjunctive may well be dying, but I am shedding no tears for it. This unconcern is, perhaps, a minority view amongst men of letters, for whom saying if I were instead of if I was is often a marker of a proper education, but I’m comforted by the fact that it is the majority view amongst users of English.
The subjunctive, if you’re not familiar with it, is a verbal mood* that appears in a variety of languages. It’s prominent in Romance languages (if you’ve taken French or Spanish, you’ve surely encountered it), and it exists to various extents in other Indo-European languages as well, including English. The basic idea of the subjunctive mood is that it expresses something counter to reality. For instance, one might say:
(1) If Alicia were the President, she’d get Party Down back on the air.
Normally, you’d say “Alicia was”; “Alicia were” would be a misconjugation. But because we’re talking about a counterfactual situation (Alicia is not really the president), we can use the subjunctive mood instead. And in the subjunctive mood, the present tense of the verb to be is were, regardless of the subject.
Often you’ll see people using the regular present tense in these situations, writing in (1) “if Alicia was the President”. That’s because the English subjunctive is pretty weak. It can be used in counterfactual situations, but it generally isn’t required. Because it’s optional and subtle (it looks just like the plural indicative forms of most verbs), it’s no surprise it’s disappearing.
Many grammarians wail and gnash teeth for this loss, and try to explain how important the subjunctive is.** Some explain that the subjunctive stresses the counterfactual nature of the situation, as though if you saw “if Alicia was president” in (1), you’d be thinking “I don’t know Alicia was president!”. Of course no one thinks this, because the counterfactuality is already established by the use of if.
What’s interesting to me, though, is that are some situations where the subjunctive is obligatory. And I say obligatory here meaning that I don’t get the right meaning out of the sentence if the subjunctive isn’t used. One occurred to me during a little monologue I was having in my head as I walked across campus the other day:
(2a) He’s obsessed with the idea that everybody admire him.
(2b) He’s obsessed with the idea that everybody admires him.
In (2a), with the subjunctive, our nameless character hopes that everybody admires him, suggesting a dearth of self-esteem. In (2b), with the indicative, our nameless character believes that everybody admires him, suggesting an overabundance of self-esteem.*** Here’s another one that just came to me, and here not using the subjunctive seems very awkward (although I’ve found examples of it in the corpus):
(3a) I require that it be done tomorrow
(3b) ?I require that it is done tomorrow
So, you might say, how can I idly declare the subjunctive on its way out while I also declare its necessity? Well, quite simply, if it disappears, we’ll do something else. In the case of (3b), it seems that this indicative form is gaining traction. As for (2a), by just changing the word idea to hope or desire, we get the same irrealis reading as (2a) without requiring the subjunctive. When language change happens, it doesn’t become impossible to say something. It just becomes impossible to say it the old way.
The worst case scenario is that the meanings of (2a) and (2b) get said the same way (with the indicative form admires), that they become a little bit ambiguous, and that we have to rely on context to tell them apart. Even that isn’t a bad situation, since we already do that with so many other things in language. The difference is critical in our current form of English, but it probably won’t be in future forms.
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*: The subjunctive is properly called a mood, not a tense, because it exists across tenses; there are past, present, and future subjunctives. This Wikipedia article has some good info on this. The “standard” mood of English is known as the indicative, because it indicates what is really there.
**: I’m especially fond of the Academy of Contemporary English’s thoughts on the matter: “[Not using the subjunctive forms] is so common, in fact, that few people realise that they are using bad English when they mix them up. The difference is of the utmost importance [...]“
NB: when only a few people notice a language distinction, it is not important, let alone of the utmost importance.
***: I won’t spoil the minor mystery by revealing which of the two I was actually thinking.
28 comments
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February 15, 2012 at 12:59 pm
mike
For subjunctive use following a, um, “verb of influence” (thanks, Spanish 201!), the example I’ve always used is:
a) They insist that he is there.
b) They insist that he be there.
It’s hard to imagine interpreting (a) such that you get (b). Would these actually ever conflate to (a)?
Anyway, the whole “death of” discussion always makes me scratch my head a little, because for conditionals we’re talking here about the loss of a form only in the very few verbs that even make a distinction between singular and plural. Compare:
a) “If I [was|were] president” — ok, change in verbal form for counterfactuals. For _singular subjects_, whereas …
b) “If they were younger” — uh, is there some change here? Or for most other verbs ..,
c) “If I talked to him, I could convince him”
c’) “If I saw him, I’d recognize him”
c”) “If I had a million dollars, …”
Are we really ONLY talking about the Death of the Subjunctive for the conditional of “to be”?
As far as I can tell, the Death of the Subjunctive boils down to omg, in counterfactual conditionals, people now use “was” instead of “were” for singular subjects. Am I overlooking huge tracts of Verbland that otherwise show the death throes of yon subjunctive?
I suppose it’s worth noting that probably no one would say “Was I you, …” instead of “Were I you, …” (i.e., no “if”), not because the Death of the Subjunctive has reached this phrase, but because no one ever says that anyway.
February 15, 2012 at 1:06 pm
Thomas Voß
“Often you’ll see people using the regular present tense in these situations, writing in (1) ‘if Alicia was the President’.”
Wouldn’t that be the past tense? Also, can it really be said that the subjunctive is dying? Isn’t it so that its forms are simply merging with the ones of the past tense?
February 15, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Jonathon
The subjunctive has been in decline for millennia. A thousand years ago it was almost completely distinct from the indicative mood; today it only applies to be and third-person singular present verbs. When I took Old English, we came across a passage in class where the writer had used the indicative but where the subjunctive was very obviously called for. People aren’t using it precisely because it isn’t very useful.
Though interestingly, a classmate of mine last semester found that the mandative subjunctive (as in 3a) appears to be increasing.
But elsewhere the present subjunctive is on the decline. It was formerly used for future hypotheticals, as in “till death do us part” and Pippin’s oath in The Return of the King: “until my lord release me, or death take me, or the world end.” Now we just use the indicative there.
(Also, Gabe, I think there are a couple of errors after (1). You say “present tense” when I believe you mean “past tense.”)
February 15, 2012 at 3:59 pm
ASG
Alicia needs to become president stat. Her platform is of critical importance to me and indeed to the whole country.
February 15, 2012 at 4:32 pm
The Ridger
Indeed. The “if” is doing the heavy lifting. I only give credence to people bemoaning the death of the subjunctive if they front the verb as well conjugate it AND don’t use if. Otherwise, they’re contributing!
February 15, 2012 at 4:33 pm
John Cowan
The historic present and past subjunctives (no future subjunctive in any Germanic language I know of) have now become completely separated, and indeed CGEL applies the term “subjunctive” only to the historical present subjunctive, calling the historical past subjunctive the “conditional”. Similarly, German calls the two forms Konjunktiv I and Konjunctiv II, though in that language they can be marked for tense.
Adopting this terminology, the subjunctive is gone from BrE and related variants, which would use “They insist that he should be there” for Mike’s 1b. However, it’s still functional in AmE (I don’t know about CanE, but I expect it’s used there as well). Of course there are many set phrases that preserve the subjunctive, beginning with Long live the king! The subjunctive is always the plain form of the verb.
As for the conditional, the only remaining case is the use of were rather than was in conditions contrary to fact. This has become a usage shibboleth more than a live form, though people who need to master standard English still need to learn to use it correctly so as not to be hated on.
February 15, 2012 at 11:58 pm
dw
Adopting this terminology, the subjunctive is gone from BrE and related variants, which would use “They insist that he should be there”
I think this is somewhat overstated: the mandative/jussive subjunctive still hangs on in several relatively formal contexts in British English. I searched Google’s first page of results for for the string “demanded that” in three BrE news websites: the BBC, the Guardian newspaper, and the Telegraph newspaper. I then discarded those where
* the indicative and subjunctive forms were identical (including use of modals such as “should”, and contexts where it was not possible to be absolutely certain that plural agreement was not being used)
* the source was a press agency rather than the news organizations themselves.
Of the remainder, there were more subjunctive than indicative forms:
BBC:
* Mr Romney demanded that Mr Gingrich also RELEASE consulting contracts he struck with government-backed mortgage giant Freddie Mac. (Subjunctive)
Guardian:
* Foreign lenders have demanded that in addition to the €3.3bn cuts outlined in the package Greece also PROVIDES evidence of €325m in extra savings by next week. (Indicative)
* Arguing he had to protect the City of London, Cameron demanded that any transfer of power from national regulators to an EU regulator on financial services BE subject to a veto (Subjunctive)
* The UN security council has called for an immediate end to the violence in Libya and demanded that Muammar Gaddafi LIVE up to his responsibilities to protect his own people. (Subjunctive)
Telegraph:
* The Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key, has demanded that he FINDS out the reasons for the oil slick as he announced two government inquiries into the spill (Indicative)
* A shareholder group has demanded that James Murdoch STAND down as chairman of BSkyB in a bid to clear up the “questionable governance practices” at the company. (Subjunctive)
* …Downing Street then demanded that it DID not appear on the same day as the newspaper’s editor apologised for hacking. (Indicative)
* Johann Lamont, the Labour leader, demanded that he APOLOGISE for writing that letter (Subjunctive)
I make that 5-3 in favor of subjunctives. The Telegraph, which has the reputation of being rather conservative, seems to have gone the furthest in substituting the indicative for the subjunctive.
* She … demanded that the application BE removed from its iTunes online store. (Subjunctive)
* the head of an influential Islamic seminary in Deoband had demanded that he BE refused entry. (Subjunctive)
February 16, 2012 at 2:23 pm
goofy
Thomas Voß: if it is identical to the past tense, why not call it the past tense.
February 17, 2012 at 4:14 pm
Thomas Voß
goofy: Because it doesn’t refer to something in the past. Duh!
February 17, 2012 at 6:13 pm
goofy
And the present tense doesn’t always refer to things in the present. imo it makes sense to say that the past tense has at least two uses: to refer to events in the past, and to refer to events that are distant in reality.
February 17, 2012 at 6:15 pm
goofy
Just like the present tense can refer to events in the present, and to events in the future (next year I go to Paris).
February 18, 2012 at 11:11 am
Warsaw Will
@goofy and Thomas Voß – in EFL, we refer to this use as the Unreal Past (embracing both indicative and subjunctive past). This might be a suitable solution for you both.
February 18, 2012 at 11:38 am
mike
Unreal Past?? Do you mean that my entire memory of what a cool guy I was in high school should all be in the subjunctive? Haha. :-)
February 20, 2012 at 9:21 pm
John Cowan
dw:
Thanks for doing the research. However, I was not comparing the subjunctive to the indicative, but the subjunctive to the semantically equivalent should + infinitive construction. The very fact that only five of your eight examples are subjunctives suggests that even in the most formal writing the British are losing control of the subjunctive; as an AmE speaker, I would automatically use subjunctives in all eight sentences, specifically provide evidence, he find out, it not appear.
In general, minimal pairs between the mandative subjunctive and the indicative are uncommon, as usually the verb semantics dictates which one to use, but insist can generate them. For example, I insist that Martha tell the truth about John is a strong command to Martha via a third party, but I insist that Martha tells the truth about John is a strong claim about Martha’s truthfulness in this respect.
February 20, 2012 at 11:15 pm
dw
@John Cowan:
Thanks for your reply.
I don’t think that anyone is denying that the subjunctive survives more robustly in AmE than in BrE, but to claim that it is “gone” from BrE is an exaggeration.
How would you classify the verb “should” in a BrE phrase such as “X demanded that Y should not smoke”? Is there any reason to deny that it too is a subjunctive (albeit a subjunctive that, like most, is not morphologically marked)? It it’s not a subjunctive, what is it?
February 21, 2012 at 7:14 pm
Lindsey
I learned about the subjunctive back in Spanish class, and now I get a little upset every time I type “I insist that he be” (or something similar) in Microsoft Word and get a red underline in response.
February 21, 2012 at 7:19 pm
Lindsey
…and of course I just typed that into Word and didn’t get an underline. But really, it’s happened before.
February 22, 2012 at 4:54 am
Link love: language (40) « Sentence first
[...] the subjunctive mood disappearing, and does it [...]
February 22, 2012 at 9:15 am
John Cowan
Why, I would classify the verb should as a modal verb. :-)
Seriously, I (and most syntacticians, of which I am not one), use subjunctive as the name of a form, not the name of a meaning. We have a subjunctive when the plain form of the verb is used with all persons and numbers. Such a subjunctive can have many meanings, but the only meaning in which it is still in living use outside frozen phrases is the mandative. Mandatives can be expressed with or without the subjunctive, in the latter case by using the modal verb should followed (as modals are) by the plain form.
By the same token, I give John the book and I give the book to John mean the same thing, but only in the first sentence is John the indirect object of give. In the second sentence, a prepositional phrase is used with the same meaning as the indirect object, but that doesn’t make it an indirect object. One of the things that’s terribly wrong with conventional grammar books is their constant conflation of form and meaning.
As for the British subjunctive being dead and gone, one of the first signs of the death of a feature, even if people are still using it in formal writing, is that they can’t quite get it right by the old rules any more. In the King James Version, Ruth (of the Book of Ruth) is made to say Whither thou goest, I will go, a bit old-fashioned even for 1611. But in 2012 there are a number of Google hits for Whither thou goest, I goest and even Whither James goest, I goest, which show that the second person singular verb form is as dead as mutton, despite the hundreds of millions who say Our Father who art in Heaven every day. Sir Thomas More famously flamed William Tyndale for getting the distinctions between yes and yea, no and nay wrong in his 1524 Bible translation, showing that the distinction was then breaking down — but More actually explains the distinction backwards, showing that his own grip on it was none of the best.
February 22, 2012 at 10:36 pm
Parker Lewis
I took a whole year of Spanish in college and the last quarter was ALL about subjunctive and my instructor was totally crazy about it. Later I found out that as part of his PhD he was doing nothing but subjunctive, and this post totally reminded me of him… of how some people can become totally obsessed with a verbal form and their whole lives revolve around it.
That class was sick and the instructor insane.
February 23, 2012 at 2:34 am
Rilian
The word if doesn’t establish that it’s counterfactual. It could just be an unknown. “If I was there, then why don’t I remember it?” That’s not counterfactual, it’s allowing for the possibility that I was there. The subjunctive form of that would be “If I had been there, then I would remember it.” But I don’t, so therefore I wasn’t there.
February 23, 2012 at 10:34 am
John Cowan
Rilian: Indeed. There’s a story about a rabbi who got drunk on Purim (as is traditional) and was carried by his students out to the cemetery. They then watched to see what he’d say when he woke up, which was: “If I am dead, why do I feel like this? And if I am alive, what am I doing here?” The humor comes from the parody of Talmudic reasoning, but the grammatical point is the realis (that is, not-contrary-to-fact) nature of both of the two if-clauses, even though one of them actually is contrary to fact.
November 29, 2012 at 9:02 pm
Eahfu Baou
If Alicia was president, she would have prevented Fox from canceling Firefly. But I guess we know she wasn’t president when that momentous decision was made.
“If Alicia was president, she’d be living large” looks just plain wrong to me. I wonder what criteria are used when compiling a corpus for a descriptivist study. Edited and published writing might better reflect what is “successful” in terms of clarity and expressiveness, but would such a corpus undermine the goal of descriptivism? Certainly if the corpus samples writing with a more relaxed relationship to the rules of grammar, then we get an entirely different result. Someone always decides, and decisions are built upon ideologies. From my own biased perspective, I would say descriptivism wants to give a pass when a simple correction would advance the goal of preserving clarity and expressiveness. While the living language argument is democratizing, using it to kill the language seems counterproductive.
November 29, 2012 at 11:01 pm
Eahfu Baou
ha!
“If Alicia had been president, she would have prevented Fox from canceling Firefly.”
Even I, who would have everyone studying the subjunctive day and night, cannot get it right!
January 2, 2013 at 4:00 am
georg
In regards to the subjunctive mood, be it not correct to say “If Alicia be president, she’d strip and pole dance at Hooters.”?
February 25, 2013 at 9:29 pm
Charles Johnson
Myself, I find the subjunctive an indispensible part of everyday usage. Were it only that everyone else felt the same ! Many people fail to recognize that modern English modal verbs exist only in two apparent tenses (present and past), but that these are contiguous between their indicative and subjunctive moods. They don’t realize that saying, “I wished he could do so for me” represents the past subjunctive of can, and not the simple past. Why? Because the context is “counterfactual” or “unreal”: The implication is that “he did not, in fact, have the ability or opportunity to do (whatever) for me, despite my having wished otherwise.” If, on the other hand, I had then known that he did, in fact, have the power to do so for me and would, in fact, do so, if asked, I would have had to say (sic, past perfect subjunctive of “have to”, meaning “must”!), “I wished that he do so for me”: Here, the statement is merely a report of my prior state of mind, but not counterfactual at all. The present subjunctive of “do” is appropriate, as it signifies the continuing possibility of his taking the action I desired, but without indicating that he would then or ever thereafter actually take that action.
These issues are more clearly seen, when translated either into French or German. Voilà: “J’ai voulu, qu’il ait pu ainsi faire pour moi.” and ”J’ai voulu, qu’il fasse ainsi pour moi.” (Cf., “qu’il a pu ainsi faire” and “qu’il fait ainsi”, being the indicative past and present.) Und: “Ich mochte, daß er für mich so tun könnte.” and “Ich mochte, daß er für mich so tue.” (Cf., “tun konnte” and “so tut”, similarly.)
@Eahfu: The agreement of tenses when using the subjunctive is not quite so strict as it is with the indicative: “If Alicia were president, she would have ….” is just as good as “If Alicia had been president, …” We never see, anymore, such a thing as “If Alicia have been president, then ..” Although this is not grammatically incorrect, it is nonetheless an archaic use of the subjunctive. One rathers says, “If Alicia be (elected) president, then …”
@georg: Using the present subjunctive sets up a hypothetical present in order to distinguish an alternative future. There is no “future subjunctive” in English (unlike Spanish), rather, we prefer to use the simple future. “If Alicia be (elected) president, she will live in the White House.” Otherwise, we must say, “If Alicia were (elected) president, she would live in the White House.” (sic, past subjunctive of “will”). Some difficulty intervenes when we consider that the simple past of “will” is contiguous with the past subjunctive and sometimes used to mark the past repetitive of a verb: “When Alicia was president, she would live in the White House during the week, and at Camp David on the weekend.” (Cf, “When Alicia is president, she lives in the White House during the week and ….”) Nothing, here, is subjunctive.
March 25, 2013 at 6:35 pm
Greg
This is a very stimulating discussion. Mark me down in the column of Let it live. I don’t see the sense in warping meaning to avoid a mood. A change from “is obsessed with the idea” to “desires” or “hopes” is not an accurate paraphrase.
We should be very careful not to seem prescriptive about this or any other change in the language. The phrase “I won’t shed any tears” reads like ironic understatement for “I’ll dance on its grave.” That may not be your attitude, but it’s a short flight in most readers’ minds, and it’s all “users of English” we’re talking about, right? I’ve heard many of my fellow instructors take that attitude — trying to be modern, I guess. One of them is militant about abolishing “whom.” He would get red reading your second sentence, insisting you should re-phrase the whole thing to avoid it.
Doesn’t it seem likely that some instances of the subjunctive — the less useful ones — will die out, while the others stay around as long as people still want to be clear?
April 3, 2013 at 11:29 am
The subjunctive might be dying, if you ignore where it’s going strong | Motivated Grammar
[...] worry about the subjunctive ignores that the present subjunctive is going strong.*** I’ve written about sentences where the present subjunctive changes the meaning (though I wrote with a dimmer view of [...]