CHAPTER 22
The Subjunctive Mood of
Verbs in Main Clauses
Modern English has mostly lost
its subjunctive forms, and uses modal auxiliaries instead (might, should
etc.). Generally speaking, the subjunctive is used rather more in American
English than in British English. It is rarely acknowledged in the teaching
of English grammar in schools in English-speaking countries, nor is
it usually discussed as such by native speakers of English teaching
“English as a Second Language”. The Latin subjunctive is therefore
initially alien to speakers of English in a way in which it is not to
speakers of many other languages (e.g. the Romance languages, German),
since they use that mood frequently in their own language (and are taught
it as part of their instruction in English grammar). Teachers of languages
which employ the subjunctive spend an unusually long time teaching it
to native speakers of English.
The term “subjunctive”
is derived from subiungere “to subjoin”, “make subordinate”.
(The subjunctive is also called the coniunctivus [from coniungere
“to conjoin], a term which does not indicate the mood’s generally
subordinate role, that is to say, its use in dependent clauses which
are not grammatically complete without reference to a main clause.)
By contrast, the derivation of “indicative” from indicare
“give information” and “imperative” from imperare “give
a command” points to the more assertive function of those moods. In
German, the indicative is sometimes called the Wirklichkeitsform,
the “Reality form”, the subjunctive the Möglichkeitsform,
the “Possibility form”.
Unlike many languages, Latin
does not have any specific “conditional” tenses. In some languages,
the choice between the indicative or the subjunctive mood often reflects
particular nuances in the speaker’s perspective, a subtlety which
can be very difficult for foreigners to master; in Latin, the choice
of mood is almost always determined by well-defined grammatical rules
rather than by the speaker’s perspective and opinion.
“Mood” is derived from
modus -i masc. 2 “manner”, signifying the speaker’s
perspective on a situation. This concept is of only limited relevance
for distinguishing between the indicative and the subjunctive in Latin,
in which mood is not often used to express opinion. (In the sense “frame
of mind”, “mood” has a quite different, Germanic, origin.)
A periphrastic type of future
active subjunctive is formed by using the future active participle in
combination with subjunctive forms of esse as auxiliary verbs:
e.g. amaturus sim, amaturus essem, giving the sense “I
am/was going to love”. For more on such forms, see Chapter 25 (indirect
questions).
Most forms of the present subjunctive,
both active and passive, have a considerable affinity with future indicative
forms (of the third, fourth and third i-stem conjugations). This
affinity is not accidental: the future indicative evolved from the present
subjunctive.
So close are the similarities
between the perfect subjunctive active and the future perfect indicative
active that ancient grammarians did not even recognize the existence
of the latter tense. Priscian goes so far as to attempt to explain the
absence of the future perfect indicative in Latin by asserting, with
a magnificent lack of logic, that the Romans were too aware of the uncertainty
of the future to try to set a limit to it (i.e. by referring to a time
when an event which has not yet occurred will be in the past); he compiled
a compendious and highly influential Latin grammar for Greek speakers
at the beginning of the 6th century, and should have known better, especially
since Greek itself has an (admittedly not frequently used) future perfect
indicative. The future perfect indicative active continued to be largely
ignored in Latin grammars written in English-speaking countries until
the 18th century.
Exhortations are also known
as jussive (from iubere, “to order”) main clauses. Similarly,
the potential subjunctive is also known as the hypothetical subjunctive.
Since the thought-process in
a potential main clause can be supplemented by an “if”-clause (see
the parentheses after the examples), it is clear that such a clause
is equivalent to the apodosis of a conditional sentence; for conditional
sentences, see Chapter 27.