Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Colonial lag, colonial innovation or simply language change?
- 2 Compound verbs
- 3 The formation of the preterite and the past participle
- 4 Synthetic and analytic comparatives
- 5 Phonology and grammar
- 6 Prepositions and postpositions
- 7 Argument structure
- 8 Reflexive structures
- 9 Noun phrase modification
- 10 Nominal complements
- 11 Non-finite complements
- 12 The present perfect and the preterite
- 13 The revived subjunctive
- 14 The mandative subjunctive
- 15 The conditional subjunctive
- 16 Tag questions
- 17 The pragmatics of adverbs
- 18 How different are American and British English grammar? And how are they different?
- 19 New departures
- Bibliography
- Index
14 - The mandative subjunctive
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Colonial lag, colonial innovation or simply language change?
- 2 Compound verbs
- 3 The formation of the preterite and the past participle
- 4 Synthetic and analytic comparatives
- 5 Phonology and grammar
- 6 Prepositions and postpositions
- 7 Argument structure
- 8 Reflexive structures
- 9 Noun phrase modification
- 10 Nominal complements
- 11 Non-finite complements
- 12 The present perfect and the preterite
- 13 The revived subjunctive
- 14 The mandative subjunctive
- 15 The conditional subjunctive
- 16 Tag questions
- 17 The pragmatics of adverbs
- 18 How different are American and British English grammar? And how are they different?
- 19 New departures
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
It has been repeatedly illustrated that the mandative subjunctive (e.g. He demanded that I be there on time) has seen a re-emergence in different varieties of English (Turner 1980 for British English, Övergaard 1995 for British and American English, Peters 1998 for Australian English). Some studies have shown the subjunctive to be alive and well and living (primarily) in American English (Övergaard 1995, Albakry and Crawford 2004) or that American English is leading in its revitalization and that British English is ‘lagging behind’ (Hundt 1998b: 171). These studies have reached the general consensus that American English prefers the subjunctive form (e.g. They suggested that he be reprimanded) while British English favours the modal construction (They suggested that he should be reprimanded). The present chapter is also concerned with describing subjunctive contrasts in British and American English through a close examination of a finite set of words (i.e. subjunctive triggers) which co-occur with the subjunctive. The focus of this chapter is not wholly concerned with whether American English has more subjunctives than British English or whether British English uses more modal forms than American English; instead, this chapter illustrates the distributional differences of complement clause types in both American and British English in a fairly large corpus of news writing.
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- Information
- One Language, Two Grammars?Differences between British and American English, pp. 257 - 276Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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