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Part of
Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English
Edited by Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier
[Studies in Language Companion Series 159] 2014
► pp. 259–280

The subjunctive mood in Philippine English

A diachronic analysis

| De La Salle University, Manila
| De La Salle University, Manila
ORCID logo | De La Salle University, Manila

American English has been observed to be leading the way in the revival of the (mandative) subjunctive, leaving behind British English and its postcolonial “children”. Drawing on data from two sets of corpora, sampled in the 1960s and the 1990s, this paper examines the extent to which Philippine English, a distinctively American-rooted variety, has been following American patterns in its use of the subjunctive (both the mandative and the hypothetical were-subjunctive). Some of the findings reflect the historical exonormative dependence of Philippine English on its American “parent” (notably, its continuing preference for the subjunctive over should-periphrasis, and its dispreference for the indicative, in mandative constructions), while others reflect its evolutionary progression towards endonormative stability (for example its disregard for American maintenance of the traditional formality connotations of the mandative subjunctive, and for the American preference for subjunctive were over indicative was in subordinate counterfactual clauses).

Published online: 11 September 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.159.13col
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