|
 |
Indicative vs Subjunctive in English | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6407 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 9 of 24 28 September 2014 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I don't think it's a preference for obsolete forms, just a transfer of L1 structures or other English structures. TBH before this thread I didn't even realize that this was the subjunctive - we were just taught this as a weird exception. Maybe this mistake is more common among the native speakers of Slavic languages? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4478 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 10 of 24 29 September 2014 at 2:17am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
|
Nah, I've heard Germans and speakers of Dutch use this construction too: ''I recommend you to put out the cigarette since it's not allowed to smoke here.''
(idiomatic English: I recommend (that) you put out the cigarette since smoking isn't allowed here'') Edited by Medulin on 29 September 2014 at 2:25am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6469 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 11 of 24 29 September 2014 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
|
My English teacher in highschool insisted that it did not exist and started to explain to me what conjunctions were
instead. She had the most beautiful hand on the white boars though, better any any of my other teachers ever. Nevertheless, there seems to be a lot of people who have no idea this exists – and the morphology of it is pretty darn weak. Even the now almost entirely dead Swedish subjunctive has more morphology! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Slayertplsko Heptaglot Newbie Slovakia Joined 4643 days ago 24 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Czech, FrenchB2, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish | Message 12 of 24 08 October 2014 at 11:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I'm going to disagree with you on this point. The subjunctive mood is used for many more things than demands that someone do something. Even in French, as you surely know, it has many more uses that have nothing to do with demands (Vive le roi! or Bien que je lui aie tout donné, elle....). And then there is the plus-que-parfait du subjonctif. In German it's called Konjunktiv and its present forms are used very frequently in writing when quoting or paraphrasing what someone else said. Just open any newspaper and you'll see tons of it. But German also has a past form of subjunctive and it's alive and well in conditional sentences and probably elsewhere, too. And this is exactly the same thing as the English 'were'. It's just that in English it's the only surviving instance of past subjunctive. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5342 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 24 08 October 2014 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
My apologies for not being clearer, but I think you've misunderstood my post rather completely. When I spoke of the "'demand that' subjunctive", I was speaking of a specific inflected form that occurs in many different contexts. It's this one:
This form very nearly obligatory (in most standard dialects) with ask that, demand that, be essential that, and a long list of other contexts. And happily enough, this form works almost exactly like the French subjunctive, although the list of affected contexts is much larger in French:
But linguistically speaking, this form has nothing at all to do with this other rather odd construction in English:
The oddness here is that standard English prefers were over was. The only verb affected by this oddity is "to be", and it really isn't grammatically analogous to the form we discussed above. For a full linguistic analysis of what's going on, I recommend the CGotEL. For a shorter rant by one the same authors, try this blog post. However, if you force things a bit, English does permit something which looks sort of like the French passé du subjonctif:
The author of this sentence is convinced that English has a present perfect subjunctive that works like the French passé du subjonctif. But there's still no relationship between this form, and the form we see in "If I were ___": The two forms affect entirely different contexts, and there's no simple present/past relationship between them. I mean, sure, you can call them both "subjunctive" if you want, or call them "weebles" and "frombles". But regardless of what you call them, these two forms have almost nothing to do with each other, grammatically speaking. Edited by emk on 08 October 2014 at 3:06pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Slayertplsko Heptaglot Newbie Slovakia Joined 4643 days ago 24 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Czech, FrenchB2, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish | Message 14 of 24 08 October 2014 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
That's true, it's different. But couldn't it be said that subjunctive simply serves many functions in a language? To me, the English past subjunctive form doesn't sound strange at all. It's the same thing in German where it's inflected more. Take the verb sein 'to be' In present subjunctive (Konjunktiv I) it goes ich sei, du seist, er/sie/es sei, wir seien, ihr seiet, sie/Sie seien. Notice the (to me at least) interesting similarity with English in that the subjunctive resembles the infinitive quite a lot and this is true for every German verb (the German indicative is: bin, bist, ist, sind, seid, sind, i.e. very irregular). But since English no longer has any present tense endings, barring the 3rd per. sg. -s, in English the infinitive and subjunctive of this and every other verb are the same. In past subjunctive (Konjunktiv II) it goes ich wäre, du wärst, er/sie/es wäre, wir wären, ihr wärt, sie/Sie wären. Does it resemble the English ''if I were you'' quite a lot? I think it does. The indicative is not much different in this case (war, warst, war, waren, wart, waren). I've read the blog article about subjunctive but the author doesn't give any explanation for why it should be wrong to call the 'were' form past subjunctive. He just called those doing it clueless, which doesn't really help. My theory on this is that the subjunctive (called conjunctive in some languages, e.g. German or Italian) has several functions, but to express it in the most general terms possible (based on my knowledge of English, German and French), it always implies some uncertainty. This implication of uncertainty means that it can well serve these purposes: 1, indirect speech (the present subjunctive in German), since it's not clear if it's true, but someone claims it to be. Wikipedia says that in German you can use even past subjunctive in this case to cast even more doubt on the reported past statement, but I've never encountered it. 2, demands in those that/que clauses(the present subjunctive in French and English) - again, it's uncertain 3, wishes and such (in all three - Vive le roi!, Thy will be done., Deine Wille geschehe.) 4, in conditional sentences (in all three, but most prominently in German) - the past forms of subjunctive are used to express the unlikeliness of the outcome. The 'were' construction in English, the imparfait and plus-que-parfait du subjonctif are used in novels in both clauses instead of imparfait and plus-que-parfait d'inficatif and conditionnel and conditionnel passé. In German the use of Konjunktiv II in these cases is very common. So I think that English is influenced by both the West Germanic subjunctive as well as the French/Romance subjunctive and combines the two. I agree, however, that the definitions are quite messy. Like why call it subjunctive and not conditional, etc.
Very interesting. Legal talk, it seems. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4517 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 15 of 24 08 October 2014 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
|
And this is why Dutch (which has a conjunctive form, theoretically), never uses it
anymore! :D 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4331 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 16 of 24 08 October 2014 at 7:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Er sagt, er sei gern in Berlin. --> Either he claims that he is in Berlin and he likes it there, or he claims that he has been in Berlin and usually liked it there. Er sagt, er wäre gern in Berlin. --> He is not in Berlin right now, but he claims he would like to be there. The subordinate clause wouldn't change if the main verb was "sagte" btw. (unlike Scandinavian languages for example). It's not so much about the degree of doubt, but rather what he really said, ie. either a wish/hope or a statement. In spoken German, Konjunktiv I is practically not used anymore (not sure if that is true for all regions), depending on the situation you could render it as indicative or Konjunktiv II. You see this often in written texts too nowadays. Maybe someday, it will be like in English. Edited by daegga on 08 October 2014 at 7:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
