My understanding of the concept of the subjunctive combines the categories mood and modality. It is identified by its form as a realisation of the category mood, and it expresses one of several kinds of root modality. Depending on its occurrence in one of the periods OE, ME or EModE it is overtly marked for different persons and numbers in lexical verbs. The verb be distinguishes more forms than the lexical verbs. These additional forms and all forms of past tense were excluded from the analysis. The number of relevant forms drops from period to period. The subjunctive is attested in the construction types main clause, relative clause, noun clause and adverbial clause. The verb forms or verbal syntagms which compete with the subjunctive differ in these construction types and also in the individual periods.

My treatment of the subjunctive is strictly corpus based. The data of my corpus come from the HC and amount to 487,730 words. They have been coded for the extralinguistic parameters text, number in text, (sub) period, region (only for OE and ME), prose vs. verse (only for OE and ME) and for several linguistic parameters according to the construction type. The quantitative analysis of my data was carried out with the statistics program SPSS. It is presented in the form of tables and illustrated by corpus examples. The tables contain absolute and relative frequencies, usually as percentage figures. Reasons for this strategy are given in Chapter 1.

Chapters 2–5 provide descriptions of the use of the subjunctive and its competitors in the construction types main clause, relative clause, noun clause and adverbial clause in the periods OE, ME and EModE. Here the scope of the book surpasses that of earlier studies, which neglected subjunctive use in main clauses and in relative clauses. Furthermore, the publications which focused on one of the construction types noun clause or adverbial clause dealt with one period only. A detailed presentation of the hypotheses and findings of earlier studies and their evaluation in light of the results of my analysis is to be found at the beginning and end of each chapter.

Chapter 6 approaches subjunctive use from a different point of view.