Grammars and handbooks of all periods of the English language agree that the subjunctive in main clauses expresses a special type of modality. The terminology varies: ‘directives and exhortations’ (Traugott 1992: 184); ‘le souhait rèalisable, le conseil, la prescription, le commandemant et, à la forme nègative, l’interdiction’ (Mossé 1945: 151); ‘wishes and commands’ (Burrow and Turville-Petre 1992: 48); ‘contingency and supposition’ (Fischer 1992: 246); ‘wishes and exhortations’ (Nevalainen 2006: 97); ‘desire’ (Gorlach 1991: 113); ‘doubt, unreality, wishes, commands’ (Denison 1998: 160).

These types of modality are captured in speech act theory by the notion of directive speech act. In directive speech acts, an agent commands, requests, recommends, desires, etc. that an action be performed (Searle 1976: 11). According to my descriptive model of the subjunctive directive speech acts express several kinds of root modality, in particular deontic and bouletic modality. Subjunctives are, however, only one realisation possibility of directive speech acts. The competitors of subjunctives are identified via their modality.

For PDE, several descriptive models of directive speech acts exist; they correlate communicative intentions and linguistic structures (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989: 18, Diani 2001: 78f., Ervin-Tripp 1976: 29, Trosborg 1995: 35). Basically, these models distinguish between direct and indirect directives, and within these categories between types of a higher or lower degree of directness or explicitness. The illocutionary force of these types is expressed by well-defined sets of linguistic patterns.

My treatment of the subjunctive in main clauses will progress along the periods OE, ME and EModE, and each period will start with a review of relevant publications and will be followed by the analysis of my corpus of the respective period.

Old English main clauses: the subjunctive and its competitors in earlier publications

Models of the type described above have also been applied to the analysis of directives in texts of earlier periods (Culpeper and Archer 2008, Kohnen 2000, 2002, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, Moessner 2010b). Only Kohnen (2000, 2007, 2008a, 2008b) includes data from the OE period.