Come What May: The History and Future of the English Subjunctive

Many native English speakers (myself included), when first studying a Romance language, are quite surprised and confused by the sheer diversity of inflectional endings that Romance verbs display. While the richer morphological distinctions between different gender and number combinations is not entirely unfathomable due to the somewhat similar distinctions in forms of “be”, particularly fascinating or frustrating – the choice of adjective highly variable depending on who you ask – is the additional inflection multiplying factor of grammatical mood. The subjunctive mood, which is of interest for this paper, tends to be particularly difficult for learners to grasp due to its seeming absence from English (as opposed to the imperative mood, which is used, albeit in morphologically less rich forms, similarly in English as to the Romance languages). In fact, in secondary school-type introductory courses, it is often claimed that English simply has no analog to e.g. the Spanish subjuntivo or Italian congiuntivo. While these claims are not true, they reflect the intuition many English speakers have that the subjunctive mood exists in only an impoverished form in present-day English. In this paper, I investigate the historical developments leading to this conception of the English subjunctive mood, examine the modern usage of explicitly marked subjunctive constructions, and make some cautious predictions regarding the future development of the English subjunctive, or lack thereof. I conclude that English has, since its earliest days, been losing the tendency towards and the observable artifacts of subjunctive expression and will likely continue to do so.