Re: English Subjunctive

As an EFL teacher, I think I am qualified to comment on the subjunctive.

First of all, there are two main types of subjunctive the present
subjunctive and the past subjunctive. The present subjunctive DOES exist in
British English although it is more rare than in American English. I think
the reason is probably due to the sucess of the Plain English movement. The
present subjunctive is always formal, but the Plain English Campagn regards
it as slightly pompous. "Should" + the bare infinitive is more common
although a British speaker would probably not even notice that the
subjunctive was used. The American use of "gotten" in the perfect tenses is
far more noticable.

The use of the past subjunctive is very common in British English again it
tends to be more formal although strangely the form "If I were you..." is
more common than "If I was you..." in informal speach too.

This is of course a special case of the second conditional.

As to whether the subjunctive represents uncertainty, what I think is
happening is that in the past subjunctive this is true as the past tense is
being used to indicate psychological distance in the same way that modal
verbs can do this although the action may still be in the present tense.

In the present subjunctive the opposite is happening we go to the
infinitive. This is what happpens in the imperative, in a sense it is more
now than now. I don't think the present subjunctive represents uncertainty.
It does represent urgency.

Grammatically, I think that the subjunctive followed by "that" clauses is
related to the catenatives since the catenatives are verbs that do their
action to a gerund or an infinitive with or without "to" directly or
through an object. If you think about it, verbs like command, demand,
insist, etc, do their action to the object and the subjunctive verb.

I'll leave you with this question:

Is it also a type of relative clause?

If you need more info on the subjunctive, I recommend:

http://grammar.englishclub.com/verbs-subjunctive.htm
and
http://www.dbis.ns.ca/~stirling/gramch09.html

Andrew Patterson.


Grammatically, the subjunctive seems to be related to the catenatives