The fine-grained analysis in Chapters 2–5 of subjunctive use in the periods OE, ME and EModE in the different construction types where it is attested makes it now possible to take a bird's eye view and paint a series of four large-scale pictures. The first three are synchronic cuts through the individual periods, and the last meets the promise in the title of this book – it is a condensed history of the English subjunctive from the earliest documents to the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The subjunctive in Old English

My OE corpus, which comprises 128,200 words, contains 5,969 relevant verbal syntagms. Of relevance are those with a verb form of the second or third person singular present tense or plural present tense. With 2,753 occurrences, main clauses contribute most to the overall figure; they are followed by adverbial clauses (1,642 verbal syntagms), relative clauses (836 verbal syntagms) and noun clauses (738 verbal syntagms).

The subjunctive and its competitors

A comprehensive description of subjunctive use in a given period needs to consider that the subjunctive competes with different forms in the individual construction types. It competes with imperatives and modal constructions in main clauses, with indicatives and modal constructions in all dependent clause types, i.e. in relative clauses, in noun clauses and in adverbial clauses. Table 6.1 shows the distribution of the subjunctive and its competitors in all construction types with absolute numbers in the first line and percentage shares in the second line of each cell.

Read horizontally the last line of Table 6.1 shows that the subjunctive is the preferred realisation of the relevant verbal syntagms of the whole OE corpus. Relative clauses differ from all other construction types, and the indicative is the preferred realisation of their verbal syntagms. In main clauses a large share of subjunctives was to be expected, because only main clauses with verbal syntagms expressing root modality (subtypes bouletic and deontic modality) were included in the corpus; main clauses with indicative verbal syntagms were excluded by definition.

Read vertically the table reveals that larger shares of subjunctives than in the whole corpus are found in noun clauses and adverbial clauses; in main clauses their share is only slightly below that of the whole corpus.