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The English subjunctive is realized as a finite but tenseless clause. Subjunctive clauses use a bare or plain verb form, which lacks any inflection. For instance, a subjunctive clause would use the verb form "be" rather than "am/is/are" and "arrive" rather than "arrives", regardless of the person and number of the subject. [4] (1) Subjunctive ...
The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of an utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude toward it.Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used ...
In the Latin language, the present subjunctive has a usage labelled the "jussive subjunctive" or coniunctivus iussivus that expresses 3rd-person orders: [4] [5] Adiuvet ("Let him help.") Veniant ("Let them come.") A jussive use of the present subjunctive is also attested for the second person in sayings and poetry, as well as in early Latin. [6]
Many languages do not have a morphological subjunctive (e.g. Danish and Dutch) and many that do have it do not use it for this sort of conditional (e.g. French, Swahili, all Indo-Aryan languages that have a subjunctive). Moreover, languages that do use the subjunctive for such conditionals only do so if they have a specific past subjunctive form.
1 In modern usage, the imperfect indicative usually replaces the imperfect subjunctive in this type of sentence. The subjunctive mood figures prominently in the grammar of the Romance languages, which require this mood for certain types of dependent clauses. This point commonly causes difficulty for English speakers learning these languages.
In elliptical sentences (see below), inversion takes place after so (meaning "also") as well as after the negative neither: so do I, neither does she. Inversion can also be used to form conditional clauses, beginning with should, were (subjunctive), or had, in the following ways: should I win the race (equivalent to if I win the race);
For instance, in the sentence "I know Bette is a dolphin", the clause "Bette is a dolphin" occurs as the complement of the verb "know" rather than as a freestanding sentence. Subtypes of dependent clauses include content clauses, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, and clauses that complement an independent clause in the subjunctive mood.
One authority, Hale, explains the usage as follows: [23] In complex sentences made up of a main sentence with subjunctive verb and one or more subordinate sentences, the modal feeling in the speaker's mind which expresses itself in the main sentence is, in the nature of things, very likely to continue in the speaker's mind in the subordinated sentence or sentences, either quite unchanged or ...