The status of the subjunctive is examined in this Australian study of its manifestations in subordinate clauses: in mandative constructions as well as those expressing purpose, condition, concession and the counterfactual. Data from the Australian ACE corpus (1986) is compared with (a) those from the American Brown corpus and the British LOB corpus (both 1961); and with (b) findings from an Australian elicitation survey of 1993. Both the diachronic corpus comparisons and the sociolinguistic profiles associated with the survey indicate declining use of the subjunctive in adverbial clauses, most notably the counterfactual type, but also those expressing purpose, concession and ordinary conditions. However the use of mandative subjunctives is stable, written into a range of corpus materials (fiction and non-fiction), and endorsed by Australians across the age range. The resilience of the mandative subjunctive in Australian (and American) usage contrasts with the prevailing view of British usage commentators, that the subjunctive, if not obsolescent, should not be preserved.
2021. Be that as it may: The Unremarkable Trajectory of the English Subjunctive in North American Speech. Language Variation and Change 33:1 ► pp. 107 ff.
Lee, Jackie
2006. Subjunctive wereand indicative was: a corpus analysis for English language teachers and textbook writers. Language Teaching Research 10:1 ► pp. 80 ff.
Mark Davies
2013. Examining syntactic variation in English: The importance of corpus design and corpus size. English Language and Linguistics 19:3 ► pp. 1 ff.
2020. English Usage. In The Handbook of English Linguistics, ► pp. 615 ff.
Vaughan, Jill & Jean Mulder
2014. The Survival of the Subjunctive in Australian English: Ossification, Indexicality and Stance. Australian Journal of Linguistics 34:4 ► pp. 486 ff.
Yao, Xinyue & Peter Collins
2019. Developments in Australian, British, and American English Grammar from 1931 to 2006: An Aggregate, Comparative Approach to Dialectal Variation and Change. Journal of English Linguistics 47:2 ► pp. 120 ff.
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