The Suasive Subjunctive: Alive and Well in the Upper Midwest

Abstract

IT IS A COMMONPLACE AMONG COMPOSITION the subjunctive is dead. They have taken its feeble pulse and shut off the lifesupport system of Freshman Composition.1 They can cite the diagnoses of the last 100 years; the prognosis has been consistently gloomy. 1892, for example, Samuel Ramsey, having noted preference for the indicative over the subjunctive in recent Bible translations, predicted the subjunctive mood may in time pass away entirely (457). 1908 George Krapp was less tentative, opining that the subjunctive has almost completely disappeared (168). The King's English, Fowler labeled the word subjunctive meaningless to Englishmen, the thing having so nearly perished (163). The work of Fries, published in 1940 but based on texts gathered in the 1920s, supported such predictions: In general the subjunctive has tended to disappear from (106). Linguists concur, referring to the subjunctive as a vestigial survival (Strang 1963, 134), or an important category in contemporary (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik, 76).2 Two other commonplaces attend the subjunctive, only people who read widely recognize and use the subjunctive, and it typically occurs in formal English. Do your students use the subjunctive? asked number of English teachers. A common reply sounded like this: I learned to use the subjunctive by reading. My students don't read. They don't know what the subjunctive is. This literate myth, which also assumes the subjunctive typically occurs in the sort of English produced by teachers and writers (Strang 1970, 209), is closely connected to the third commonplace, the subjunctive is characteristic of formal English.3 Fries suggested the same opposition when he noted the contrast between the of his standard and vulgar English letters, the latter not lending to the use of. . . formal requests (105). the third edition of the Writer's Guide (1959), Perrin noted subjunctive clauses are usually in Formal context (728).4 As with most commonplaces, those connected with the subjunctive are partly valid. The conditional subjunctive is less used than formerly, and commonly misused. The subjunctive does have formal feel about it, and people who consider themselves literate not only use the subjunctive but

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