| Sidor om ämnet: < [1 2 3 4] > | Is the subjunctive disappearing in English? Trådens avsändare: Tim Drayton (X)
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Phil Hand 
Kina
Local time: 14:50
Kinesiska till Engelska
| Simpler explanation | May 17, 2014 |
Oliver Walter wrote:
Taking a cue from Neil's remark about science and simple explanations, I think the non-use of the subjunctive (if that's what it is) where many native English speakers would use it is due to a mixture of ignorance (including copying bad examples) and bad teaching, analogous to the reasons for remarks such as "If he would have done X, they would have done Y" instead of the correct "If he had done X, they would have done Y".
Oliver
I'm not sure I disagree with the substance of what you're saying, just with the judgmental language in which you cast it. We can rephrase:
The change in English, like all past language change, is due to imperfect acquisition and invention of new conventions (following recognised language change processes). That's simpler because it contains everything you said, minus the negative affect.
| | | | Giles Watson
Italien
Local time: 08:50
Italienska till Engelska
In memoriam | The terminological fog is clearing... | May 17, 2014 |
Neil Coffey wrote:
So, I think my view would agree somewhat with this but where I differ slightly is that I think it's helpful to distinguish between what is strictly 'mood'-- a systematic marking of modality through verb morphology, which is essentially as systematic a dimension as other 'core' features such as tense, aspect, number etc-- and other means of marking modality which are more 'peripheral' to the verb phrase, including the modal auxiliaries in English.
What you call "mood" is what I would call "verbal mood", the morphological sub-category (including auxiliaries in verb phrases) of the broader discourse category "mood", which embraces all the ways the speaker can express an attitude towards the utterance. Once we have our terminology straight, though, there's no problem.
It's not clear to me that the thing people informally call "subjunctive" in English is one of these 'core, systematic dimensions' to the verb morphology (whereas in various other languages it is).
It certainly was in the past but as you say, the form has become pretty vestigial nowadays and has more to do with register than morphological meaning.
| | | | Tim Drayton (X)
Cypern
Local time: 09:50
Turkiska till Engelska
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TOPIC STARTER | Occam's razor | May 19, 2014 |
Essentially, Neil is talking about applying Occam's razor, and of course he is right. Anybody who has taught TEFL will know that we teach something called the second conditional, and the 'rule' we teach is that the verb in the clause introduced by 'if' is in the 'past tense', although there is one 'exception': the singular form of 'be' is 'were' rather than 'was', i.e. 'I, he, she it were', except that this is only optional nowadays and you can use 'was' here if you wish.
Looked at ... See more Essentially, Neil is talking about applying Occam's razor, and of course he is right. Anybody who has taught TEFL will know that we teach something called the second conditional, and the 'rule' we teach is that the verb in the clause introduced by 'if' is in the 'past tense', although there is one 'exception': the singular form of 'be' is 'were' rather than 'was', i.e. 'I, he, she it were', except that this is only optional nowadays and you can use 'was' here if you wish.
Looked at historically, and we can do this because Anglo-Saxon was written, Old English had a full-blown system of subjunctives (see:http://books.google.com.cy/books?id=kzARAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=subjunctive%20"anglo%20saxon"&source=bl&ots=Tgcw2mID9_&sig=1P6n5okTmCKIgyNI996_dnibvCI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FtB5U_-nAuaU0AWPwoCQAg&ved=0CCwQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=subjunctive%20"anglo%20saxon"&f=false), as does the cognate language of modern German, except a tendency to avoid it in some contexts has also crept in over the past couple of centuries. Over time, vowel change (and I suspect that the great vowel change toward the end of the period of Middle English has a lot to do with this) has destroyed this distinction. The past indicative and subjunctive forms fused. From a pedantic, historically correct viewpoint, we can say that the so-called second conditional in English uses the past subjunctive in the 'if-clause', except that this form is always identical to the past indicative, apart from the singular past tense of 'to be'.
I remember being taught the equivalent of the 'second conditional' in German at secondary school at about the age of 16, and learning that the past subjunctive is used here (or was in the language of Goethe and Schiller) such that you add an umlaut (and a final 'e' in the singular), e.g. 'Ich kam' = 'I came' 'Wenn ich käme' = 'If I came', and the penny dropped when I saw the umlauted form of 'war' = 'was', which is 'wäre', that this is why we say 'If I were' rather than 'If I was' in English. I saw that this single instance of Germanic umlauting had survived into modern English! But of course, as Neil says, it is far easier to teach learners the 'fiction' that this is the past tense with 'were' being the sole 'exception', and indeed to adopt this is the most elegant synchronic scientific theory.
However, I think the present subjunctive, even though it has fused with the indicative in most cases, has put up a bit more of a fight, and even the most elegant description still probably needs to take account of it.
[Edited at 2014-05-19 10:17 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Giles Watson
Italien
Local time: 08:50
Italienska till Engelska
In memoriam | Teaching and translating | May 19, 2014 |
Tim Drayton wrote:
Essentially, Neil is talking about applying Occam's razor, and of course he is right. Anybody who has taught TEFL will know that we teach something called the second conditional,
The grammar models used to teach EFL tend, quite rightly, to be pared down to the minimum: EFL teachers generally have other priorities (and I speak from experience!).
But we are not language learners, or at least only incrementally so in our working pairs, and neither are we academic grammarians: we are translators. What we need is a way of comparing our source and target languages in terms that are comprehensible to speakers of either, and to our peers.
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Tim Drayton (X)
Cypern
Local time: 09:50
Turkiska till Engelska
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TOPIC STARTER | Is this sentence right or wrong? | May 19, 2014 |
Let us not get too sidetracked by labels. Regardless of whether we call this form the subjunctive or not (and the received view is that it is the subjunctive), my real question is whether a sentence such as the following, taken from the British Journal of Family Medicine, is correct (grammatical) or not?
"If TV is suspected in a patient, then it is recommended that she is referred to the local GU clinic for appropriate testing, treat... See more Let us not get too sidetracked by labels. Regardless of whether we call this form the subjunctive or not (and the received view is that it is the subjunctive), my real question is whether a sentence such as the following, taken from the British Journal of Family Medicine, is correct (grammatical) or not?
"If TV is suspected in a patient, then it is recommended that she is referred to the local GU clinic for appropriate testing, treatment and also contact tracing."
http://www.bjfm.co.uk/management_of_vulvovaginal_infections_in_primary_care_part_2__bacterial_vaginosis_and_trichomonas_vaginalis_25769807261.aspx
To my ears it is wrong, and in my idiolect 'recommend that' takes the subjunctive (if this is what we are to call it) and the correct form here is 'that she be' and not 'that she is'. Having encountered such 'mistakes' a number of times in impeccable sources, I am starting to wonder if this rule of English grammar is undergoing a transformation. That, basically, is what I was interested in getting feedback about. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Giles Watson
Italien
Local time: 08:50
Italienska till Engelska
In memoriam | What is "right"? | May 19, 2014 |
It depends on what you mean by "right", Tim.
The indicative in the subordinate clause after "recommend" passes the test of clarity because the modal notion is already present in the dynamic verb. Whether we like it or not depends on personal preference.
What I don't like about the sentence is the sequence of three verbs in the passive voice, which could be reformulated along the lines of:
If TV is suspected, the patient should be referred to the local GU clinic for appropriate testing, treatment and contact tracing.
My two piastres.
| | | | Tim Drayton (X)
Cypern
Local time: 09:50
Turkiska till Engelska
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | What is right? | May 19, 2014 |
I am simply following the methodology used by Linguistics and deciding through introspection whether it instinctively sounds right or wrong.
| | | | Phil Hand
Kina
Local time: 14:50
Kinesiska till Engelska
| Two different kinds of personal preference | May 19, 2014 |
Giles Watson wrote:
It depends on what you mean by "right", Tim.
The indicative in the subordinate clause after "recommend" passes the test of clarity because the modal notion is already present in the dynamic verb. Whether we like it or not depends on personal preference.
I think Tim is asking the right question. It's not just personal preference. We each of us have an understanding of language which tells us whether a sentence is right or wrong; then within what's right we all have preferences for particular forms.
So, for example, I use "different to", Americans tend to use "different from" or "different than". None of us uses "different of". As a linguist I should distinguish between "different from" and "different of", even though neither are my preferred form.
Tim's asking if "it is recommended that she is referred" has moved from the "different of" category (not correct English at all) to the "different from" category (correct English for a reasonably large group of speakers).
My judgment is the same as above. That sentence is perfectly well-formed for me, and the version with "be" would be perfectly well-formed as well.
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Giles Watson
Italien
Local time: 08:50
Italienska till Engelska
In memoriam
Phil Hand wrote:
I think Tim is asking the right question. It's not just personal preference.
The sentence is grammatically acceptable and its meaning is clear with either form of the verb. If that's our definition of "right", it's fine by me.
However the formulation of thought in the sentence is inelegant (my value judgement) and uneconomical (a point of fact) in both cases.
| | | | Neil Coffey
Storbritannien
Local time: 07:50
Franska till Engelska
+ ...
| Occam's razor, practical realities and other considerations... :) | May 19, 2014 |
Tim Drayton wrote:
Essentially, Neil is talking about applying Occam's razor, and of course he is right. Anybody who has taught TEFL will know that we teach something called the second conditional, and the 'rule' we teach is that the verb in the clause introduced by 'if' is in the 'past tense', although there is one 'exception'
Now of course, in focussing only on the Occam's razor principle, I was being slightly disingenuous for the sake of illustrating a point. The reality is usually that models are proposed on the basis of a combination of "good scientific method" AND a host of practical considerations.
And I think that's fine, so long as when the merits of such an analysis are weighed up, the merits of the practical compromises are also taken into account. So e.g. with respect to saying that English has "subjunctive" forms, what I often observe is that this actually *confuses* natives of languages with subjunctives who are learning English and vice versa. (It's interesting to note your example of how e.g. "if it were" is now being taught in TEFL literature, though you will also find TEFL literature stating (hugely questionably) that this is a "past subjunctive".)
Tim Drayton wrote:
Looked at historically, and we can do this because Anglo-Saxon was written, Old English had a full-blown system of subjunctives
This is true, although if anything when you look at the behaviour of Old English, I think it actually indicates why it is fallacious to state that Modern English has a system of subjunctives rather than being evidence in favour of such an analysis!
Tim Drayton wrote:
From a pedantic, historically correct viewpoint, we can say that the so-called second conditional in English...
It's not clear to me that a "historically correct" analysis is really a valid notion in the first place. Or put another way: it's not clear why an analysis based on historic evidence is intrinsically more "correct" than one that ignores such evidence completely.
Indeed, the complete opposite can be argued for if you take the view that a language is essentially the complex system that is intuitively acquired by speakers on the basis of the available input data. Utterances of Old English simply do not form part of that input data for children acquiring present-day English, so are irrelevant to a model of present-day English.
[Edited at 2014-05-19 19:54 GMT]
| | | | Neil Coffey
Storbritannien
Local time: 07:50
Franska till Engelska
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| On the breakdown of the English case system | May 19, 2014 |
Tim Drayton wrote:
Over time, vowel change (and I suspect that the great vowel change toward the end of the period of Middle English has a lot to do with this) has destroyed this distinction.
P.S. For what it's worth, the reasons for the breakdown of the English verb system (and the inflection system in general) are somewhat more complex than this and actually appear to have happened before the Great Vowel Shift (which I assume is what you're referring to?).
Languages are complex systems undergoing Darwinian-like evolution and the course of their evolution is determined by which of a whole host of factors win out overall. It's really difficult to point to a single underlying reason for a particular observed change. Factors such as a large number of bilingual speakers (in particular bilingual speakers of Old English plus another Germanic dialect-- hence with similar vocabulary but differences in specific inflections) or an influx of loanwords (which shift the 'iconicity' of whether certain sound combinations mark inflections or are word-internal) might be pointed at, but I think it's impossible to pin down a single cause for this kind of systemic change.
| | | | Giles Watson
Italien
Local time: 08:50
Italienska till Engelska
In memoriam | Whose grammar is it anyway? | May 20, 2014 |
Neil Coffey wrote:
Utterances of Old English simply do not form part of that input data for children acquiring present-day English, so are irrelevant to a model of present-day English.
The grammar of the classical languages laid down that verbs in indirect speech should be in the subjunctive mood if the reporting verb - "recommend", for example - was deontic in force. The fact that modern-day English-speaking learners of classical languages have to be taught this principle shows that it is no longer functional in English grammar.
Subjunctive verbs are still, however, markers of formal language for many English speakers. Their use, misuse or avoidance can still convey information about the speaker, if not the message. The mood form survives in English as a culturally acquired register marker of which we, as translators into English, should be aware. It is there for us to use or avoid, according to the requirements of our source texts and target audiences.
As Tim F. notes, the classical convention is still functional in many registers of US English. And as Neil suggests, its users probably mastered it in the classroom, not at home or on the street.
[Edited at 2014-05-20 17:02 GMT]
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Russell Jones
Storbritannien
Local time: 07:50
Italienska till Engelska
Giles Watson wrote:
The mood form survives in English as a culturally acquired register marker of which we, as translators into English, should be aware. It is there for us to use or avoid, according to the requirements of our source texts and target audiences.
A very precise definition of our professional duty to our clients on this issue, with which I whole-heartedly agree.
However, I would argue that, as expert and educated linguists, we have broader responsibilities. To my mind, the success of the human race has been based on a balance between progress and conservatism, between the innovators and those who remind us of the successes and mistakes of the past and the reasons behind them.
Like Oliver, I find it more than a little depressing that many of the more recent changes in “accepted” English seem to have originated from ignorance of linguistic traditions and grammatical logic, even if that is a reflection of a more egalitarian society. Whether this is defined as “ignorance and bad teaching“ or “imperfect acquisition” and whether or not it has always been a “recognised language change process”, does not mean that there have not been opposing voices, nor that there should not be today and in the future.
If we, as linguists, just surrender to these trends rather than demonstrating well-founded and established practices, then who else is to provide a model for others to learn from. There is much to be said for the argument that "rules" should be broken only by those who understand them intimately.
[Edited at 2014-05-20 16:56 GMT]
| | | | Phil Hand
Kina
Local time: 14:50
Kinesiska till Engelska
I think Russell's and Giles's ideas here can be synthesized nicely:
Giles Watson wrote:
The mood form survives in English as a culturally acquired register marker of which we, as translators into English, should be aware. It is there for us to use or avoid, according to the requirements of our source texts and target audiences.
Russell Jones wrote:
If we, as linguists, just surrender to these trends rather than demonstrating well-founded and established practices, then who else is to provide a model for others to learn from.
If we look at these changes in terms of their sociolinguistics, then without judging whether they are good or bad, we can, as Russell says, accept that there is always a balance of forces for change and conservative forces. Again, without making judgments of good or bad, we can also accept that (at least certain kinds of) change often starts in (less educated) vernacular, and that written language retains older forms for longer. To the extent that we produce written texts, often for rather official usage, it would be right to say that the "correct English" which we reference should not be the English heard on the streets of Manchester. It should be the English used in official documentation in the US/UK. I think the reason that we're having this argument is precisely because there is a clash between these two types of English. I would still want to say that neither is "better" or "more correct" than the other, but I would certainly agree with an argument that the more conservative form is *more appropriate* for the vast majority of written usage. That may well change in the next 20 years, following changes in the spoken form, but for now, I think the "recommend that it be" form is sill the more standard for written purposes.
Don't really agree with the other comments that Russell made, though:
To my mind, the success of the human race has been based on a balance between progress and conservatism, between the innovators and those who remind us of the successes and mistakes of the past and the reasons behind them.
First, I think this is mixing up deliberate change and innovation with unconscious, unintentional change. Second, I don't think we're in any position to talk about successes and mistakes in language. I'm not even sure it makes sense to talk about a mistake - what would a mistake in language change look like? When a language loses expressive power because of a change, it immediately creates new forms to restore that power, because people love to express! If a language actually did manage to objectively impoverish itself, then I could see the argument for calling it a mistake. But I don't think that has ever happened (could ever happen) - and it's certainly not the case here. Our "subjunctive" forms are such a degenerate remnant that it couldn't possibly do any damage to our language if they go.
...I find it more than a little depressing that many of the more recent changes in “accepted” English seem to have originated from ignorance of linguistic traditions and grammatical logic, even if that is a reflection of a more egalitarian society.
To a first-order approximation, 0% of the population knows any "language traditions," and that has always been true. Language change is not about deliberate innovation.
There is much to be said for the argument that "rules" should be broken only by those who understand them intimately.
Same issue. This is a confusion of deliberate change and natural change.
Perhaps it would be better if we didn't use words like "change" and "innovation" but adopted language which showed more clearly what kind of a thing language change is: we could use the language of evolution. Language evolution is a natural selection process, in which old forms get die out when they lose expressive power, and new forms are tried out all the time. Those new forms that seem to add clarity are "selected" and passed on; new forms which do not die out again very quickly.
...as expert and educated linguists, we have broader responsibilities.
The responsibility I feel is to tell the truth about language generally (including language evolution), not a loyalty to the one dialect of English that I think is "right".
| | | | Neil Coffey
Storbritannien
Local time: 07:50
Franska till Engelska
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| On some of Giles' points | May 21, 2014 |
Giles Watson wrote:
Neil Coffey wrote:
Utterances of Old English simply do not form part of that input data for children acquiring present-day English, so are irrelevant to a model of present-day English.
The grammar of the classical languages laid down that verbs in indirect speech should be in the subjunctive mood if the reporting verb - "recommend", for example - was deontic in force.
This is true in the sense that grammarians have attempted to apply the grammar of classical languages to English. But as I say, that's irrelevant to the actual essence of the language. Just because a 19th century grammarian decides to declare that "O fish!" is the vocative of "fish" doesn't magically mean that English nouns suddenly acquire overt case marking.
Giles Watson wrote:
The fact that modern-day English-speaking learners of classical languages have to be taught this principle shows that it is no longer functional in English grammar.
Sort of. As Phil says, there is a problem in that you have covertly shifted from talking about "grammar" as the invited rules of grammarians to "grammar" in terms of the syntax intuited by native speakers. And with regard to the latter, actually some of the notions that are encoded as mood in classical languages (and in fact, any language with a mood system-- there's nothing linguistically special about 'classical' languages in this regard) may well be acquired intuitively by native speakers of English: just that they don't manifest themselves in the way that the grammarians wish them to.
For example, one claim is that English speakers intuitively acquire a sense that one of the following transformations is possible, but the other isn't:
(a) "Dan said that Jane left at 10pm" > "Jane left at 10pm, Dan said"
(b) "Dan demanded that Jane left at 10pm" > "*Jane left at 10pm, Dan demanded"
Giles Watson wrote:
Subjunctive verbs are still, however, markers of formal language for many English speakers. Their use, misuse or avoidance can still convey information about the speaker, if not the message. The mood form survives in English as a culturally acquired register marker of which we, as translators into English, should be aware. It is there for us to use or avoid, according to the requirements of our source texts and target audiences.
All of this I would essentially agree with (just with the proviso I've mentioned that what we informally term 'subjunctive' and 'mood' in English probably aren't such if you're using the terminology strictly to associate like with like across languages).
But are you saying that there is really a spate of translators and professional writers who aren't doing this, i.e. continually weighing up language use in the way you suggest to suit the requirements of their text?
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