Shifting Moods

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Hopefully your mood today is like the happy emoji in the picture. When I started drafting this post, I was smiling like that–until I got deeper into my research and discovered that I screwed up when I previewed the subject for you last time around. I said that the irrealis is a subset of the subjunctive mood, and a counterpart to the mandative subjunctive that we were talking about in that post. Well, it turns out—it’s not. The irrealis is actually a whole separate mood—hence the title of this installment. 

(That, by the way, is one of the things I love about doing these blogs—I learn a lot from the research!)

So let’s backpedal a little bit and finish up the subjunctive mood, and then we’ll go on to the irrealis. To review quickly, the mandative subjunctive we talked about last time is for demands, requirements, requests, recommendations, or suggestions, such as:

Last week Carol insisted that Pat go to the movies with her.

We request that the attendant lock the garage at night.

The same subjunctive form—the unmarked form of the verb, with no endings, no matter which person, or singular or plural—can also be used for hypothetical situations where there is a decent chance of the statement coming true, such as:   

Brian made back-up copies of the report lest it be accidentally deleted.

We made sure to stock up on supplies for fear that the hurricane hit hard. 

Jenny is always remarkably patient with her toddler, whether he be sleepy, grumpy, or rambunctious.

These might sound rather formal or just a bit strange—but they’re all correct. And of course they could all be written in the more everyday indicative mood, such as Jenny is always remarkably patient with her toddler, whether he is sleepy, grumpy, or rambunctious. Nevertheless, you can see that in each case there’s a reasonable chance that the hypotheticals could come true: the report could get deleted; the hurricane could hit hard; and Jenny’s little boy probably goes through all those moods (and many more) in the course of a typical day.

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The irrealis (“not real”) mood, however, is for hypotheticals that are clearly not true or have very little chance of ever coming true. In English, the only place that the irrealis is grammatically marked is with the use of were, such as in this phrase that we say all the time without even thinking about it:

If I were you…

Have you ever heard anyone say If I was you? I’ve lived in several different regions of the U.S., and I don’t think I ever have. But you get the point—when you say If I were you, you clearly are not the other person to whom you’re speaking, nor will you ever be.

But how about this one:

If Blake were better qualified, he would get the job.

As opposed to:

If Blake was better qualified, he would get the job.

The first variant implies that Blake will most likely never be able to improve his qualifications enough, but the second leaves the possibility a bit more open. So this is another function of the irrealis mood’s were—to convey a sense of what grammarians term factual remoteness.

And that leads us very neatly into our closely related subject for next time: the conditional. Until then, be on the lookout for hypotheticals in both subjunctive and irrealis moods, paying particular attention to whether they’re situations that could reasonably come true or not. If you find some good examples, please share them below!

In the (Subjunctive) Mood

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A few weeks ago, I got to do a fascinating interview (via Skype) with a PhD candidate in the UK. So what does that have to do with legendary Big Band leader Glenn Miller? The subject of the interview was one of the grammatical moods in English, namely, the subjunctive. Since I have a bit of a musical background, any mention of “mood” always reminds me of the iconic Glenn Miller tune “In the Mood.” (Click on the link if you’d like to listen to it while reading this post!)

But what IS the subjunctive mood? Unless you’re a hardcore grammar nerd, you might have never even heard of it—but if you’re a native speaker of American English, you probably use it correctly all the time. When we say that subjunctive is a mood, it means that it indicates the speaker’s attitude towards the verb. It’s not a tense (time category) such as present or past. In English, there are basically two varieties of subjunctive: mandative and irrealis. Today we’ll focus on the first one.

The mandative subjunctive is for demands, requirements, requests, recommendations, or suggestions. Its form is simple: it’s the unmarked form of the verb, with no endings. You can also think of it as the infinitive without to. In other words, it will always look exactly the same, no matter the person or whether it’s singular or plural:

I go                        We go

You go                  You go

He/she/it go        They go

As you look through these, they all probably look and sound fine—except for he/she/it go (as opposed to he/she/it goes). The only other time that mandative subjunctive is obvious is with be:

I be                         We be

You be                  You be

He/she/it be        They be

And those are the only times that it has a visibly different form in English. Otherwise, the mandative subjunctive is virtually undetectable—which is probably why most people are unaware of it.

So what does this look like in action? Check these out:

Last week Carol insisted that Pat go to the movies with her.

We request that the attendant lock the garage at night.

Here I’ve used third person singular (he/she/it) form to make the mandative subjunctive obvious: go instead of goes; lock instead of locks. In first or second person, here’s what it would look like:

Last week Carol insisted that I go to the movies with her.

We request that you lock the garage at night.

Although these look just like the usual forms for those verbs, they’re actually in mandative subjunctive mood. (BTW, the everyday mood we use most of the time, for statement of plain fact, is called indicative.)

And some examples with be:

Andrew suggested that I be notified of the travel delay.

Donald urges that you be ready for the hike.

Angela insists that they be kept in the loop.

What my UK colleague and I discovered during our interview is that, whereas speakers of American English tend to use the mandative subjunctive exactly as I’ve described, speakers of British English generally don’t. Instead, they tend to say: 

Last week Carol insisted that Pat should go to the movies with her.

Or, even more bizzarely:

Last week Carol insisted that Pat went to the movies with her.

The variation with should is OK to me, but the one with went just sounds so wrong!

Another interesting thing in the interview was that a sample sentence with be that my colleague showed me looked strange when I read it silently on the printed page, but when I read it aloud, it sounded fine. So if any of the above examples look odd, try reading them out loud!

Be on the lookout, but even more so on the listen out 😊 for these verb forms. Do these examples sound natural to you? If not, what do you usually tend to say? Feel free to comment below–let’s get a discussion going!

And I’ll be back next time with the other variety of subjunctive, the irrealis, which is used for talking about hypothetical or contrary-to-fact situation