Thank you for your very interesting and detailed comments. I hope I didn’t misunderstand your original article too much!

I find your point about French grammar (as an example that we can both refer to!) signalling a unique subjunctive form such as ‘puisse’ rather than ‘peut’ and English not possessing the same quality very interesting. I have to say, I do love the intricacies of grammar!

Thank you again very much for taking the time to comment on this posting, and may I wish you a very Merry Christmas and all the best for 2012.

Best wishes,

Becca

Becca says “I think what scares a lot of English language students about the subjunctive mood is the fact that they think English has no equivalent form.”

They’re right. English hasn’t got an equivalent form. But why should that be scary?

Here’s an example from French, the language Becca refers to:

«En janvier prochain, j’inviterai tous les partenaires sociaux à participer à un sommet sur l’emploi pour que chacun puisse apporter des solutions, faire des propositions», a annoncé Nicolas Sarkozy.
(Le Figaro 1.12.11)

If you extract the word ‘puisse’ from this sentence and consider it in isolation, it’s identifiable as a subjunctive form, distinct from the indicative ‘peut’. Grammars of French, quite rightly, provide information about such subjunctive forms.

But English?

I’m quite happy to say “Long live the Queen”. (Well, I’m not, actually; I’d much rather say “Long live the Republic”, but that isn’t a matter of grammar!) I just don’t see why I should think of it as an instance of “the subjunctive”. If you extract ‘live’ from the sentence, you’ve got no grounds for calling it a ‘subjunctive’ form; it’s just the ‘base form’, or ‘infinitive’, of this verb. It’s indistinguishable from the form used in “I live here”, “Where do you live?” etc.

“Long live X” is an idiom, syntactically unusual and lexically restricted. We don’t say things like “A hundred years live the president” or “Long survive your dynasty” or “Long prosper your firm”.

Similarly, I’m quite happy to say “If I were you, …..” and to regard it as an idiom, fixed phrase, lexical chunk, etc. etc. etc., in which the form ‘were’ enters, unusually, into concord with a first person singular subject.

To summarise: if you consider ‘live’ or ‘were’ in isolation, you can’t say that they are ‘subjunctive’ forms, whereas you can with ‘puisse’.

If you stroll through descriptions of English grammar, you stumble upon odd bits of junk that’s inherited from grammars of Latin and doesn’t serve any useful purpose in describing modern English. (Even the form of the word ‘sub-junk-tive’ suggests that this is a prime example!) Chuck it out. The fact that people say and write things like “What if this were real?” or “They demanded that she leave the premises” doesn’t mean that grammars of modern English need a category called ‘subjunctive’. I was pleased to see that there’s no mention of ‘subjunctive’ in the recently-published ‘English Grammar Today’ (CUP).

Becca says “I think the problem is something bigger, and that problem is that English grammar is not taught in English schools.” Well, I certainly agree that the grammar of English should be taught in schools in Britain, but teaching poor innocent schoolchildren that there’s such a thing as a “subjunctive” in their language will only cause unnecessary confusion in the short term and will, in the long term, for those who take it seriously, propagate the long-standing and disempowering myth that English is a debased and inadequate dialect of Latin.

Latin and the modern languages descended from it, and Old English and modern German, among others, have comprehensive sets of subjunctive verb forms, with regularities and irregularities and with extensive and well-defined uses. Modern English hasn’t. The forms that are sometimes labelled ‘subjunctive’ are much more straightforwardly and economically treated as specific uses of ‘past’ and ‘base’ forms.