Motivations for the aim and scope of the book

from the last quarter of the twentieth century onwards more and more linguists have been refuting fowler's famous claim (1965: 595) that the english subjunctive was dying (collins 2015, collins et al. 2014, crawford 2009, hoffmann 1997, hundt 1998a, 1998b, 2009, 2018, 2019, hundt and gardner 2017, Johansson and Norheim 1988, Kastronic and Poplack 2014, Kjellmer 2009, Leech et al. 2009, Övergaard 1995, Peters 1998, 2009, Sayder 1989, Schneider 2000, 2005, 2007, 2011, Serpollet 2001, Waller 2017). Only Ruohonen (2017) casts some doubt on the hypothesis of a revival of the subjunctive continuing into the twenty-first century. These studies are based on corpus-linguistic evidence and deal with the so-called mandativelx subjunctive, i.e. with subjunctive use in subordinate clauses depending on expressions of ‘demand, recommendation, proposal, resolution, intention, etc.’ (Quirk et al. 1985: 156). Their general message is that the subjunctive enjoys a healthy life and shows an increasing frequency in many diatopic varieties. The same construction type was also at issue in some studies on differences of subjunctive use in British and American English (Algeo 1988, 1992, Greenbaum 1977, Johansson 1979, Turner 1980, Nichols 1987). They are based on elicitation tests and also come to the conclusion that the subjunctive is very much alive in the second half of the twentieth century. How can we explain Fowler’s pessimistic outlook? Its assumption is that in the past the subjunctive was frequently used, but then lost its popularity.

Extensive research on the subjunctive in Old English (OE) dates from the first half of the twentieth century, but the relevant publications cover only poetry (Behre 1934), only dependent clauses (Glunz 1929, Vogt 1930, Wilde 1939/1940) or only special adverbial clauses (Callaway 1931, 1933), and they do not provide quantitative results.

Subjunctive constructions in Middle English (ME) have not received much attention. López-Couso and Méndez-Naya (1996, 2006) and Moessner (2007, 2010a) describe the use of subjunctives and alternative constructions in noun clauses after suasive verbs. The use of the subjunctive in ME conditional clauses is dealt with in Kihlbom (1939) and in Moessner (2005). The general information to be gleaned from these studies is that the development of subjunctive frequency was not uniform across construction types (frequency rise in conditional clauses, frequency drop in noun clauses) and across text categories (instructive text types preserve the subjunctive longer than narrative text types).