It’s March fourth. Happy Grammar Day! Today is a day when certain people who like to loudly declare their love for grammar put extra energy and volume into promulgating their favourite rules. Which is kind of a giveaway about their motivations: It’s not grammar itself that they love (since “bad grammar” is also grammar, adhering to a coherent underlying set of rules, just not the rules that they prefer), it’s security in an imposed order. It’s authority, as long as they get to be the authority. It’s like if someone were to say “I love flowers!” but simply could not stand the disorder of a meadow of wild flowers and had to have the tidy order of a strictly planted garden, with no flower out of place.
But there is an important difference here: Many neat grammar rules do have an organic basis in the language, and the imposed rule is intended to keep usage from drifting away from that. (This is not true of all grammar rules, mind you; for example, we know exactly when the strict distinction between less and fewer was invented, and we do not in fact owe allegiance to its inventor.)
But usage does drift. For most English speakers, for example, whom is effectively a foreign word; they have no natural feel for its usage, and so they use it in places where it’s inappropriate according to the rules they’re attempting to preserve. So a bit of freshening up on the established rules, for those who want to follow them, is not unreasonable. And – to get to my subject for this Grammar Day – for many English speakers, the subjunctive is also a strange thing that, even if they use it sometimes, they don’t altogether “get.”
Which isn’t that big a problem in most contexts. But if you were to use the subjunctive, you would need to know not just how to use it but when to use it. And the available guidelines for it are sometimes so detailed as to be confusing. Wikipedia, for example, says, “Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality, such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action, that has not yet occurred.”
Part of the problem is that these do not all require the subjunctive, but they are things it can be used for. Another part is that people get confused about what’s real versus unreal and what you can and can’t use the subjunctive for. So – as it is Grammar Day (or, if you are reading this on another day, imagine it were Grammar Day) – let me give you the quick and easy way of thinking about the subjunctive mood: It can be thought of simply as a hypothetical mood. Note that I say “mood” – it’s not a tense; it’s a perspective that can be applied to any tense, just like the indicative mood (which is the usual mood, talking about things that definitely do or don’t exist).
And this is where some people get confused, because hypotheses operate differently in the past and present than they do in the future. When we’re talking about things in the past or the present, something that’s hypothetical hasn’t happened and isn’t happening, whereas something that’s indicative has happened or is happening. To use Wikipedia’s term, in the present and the past, the unreal is known to be unreal. But when we talk about the future, it’s all hypothetical; none of it has happened yet, even when we’re using the indicative. None of it is real yet. Which means that the effect of the subjunctive in the future is not the same as in the present and the past.
Let’s look at some examples:
Past:
Subjunctive: “If you had helped me, I would have been grateful.” (You didn’t, and I wasn’t.)
Indicative: “If you helped me, I was grateful.” (You might have helped me; I just can’t remember. If you did, I was grateful.)
Present:
Subjunctive: “If you were helping me, I would be grateful.” (You aren’t, and I’m not.)
Indicative: “If you are helping me, I am grateful.” (I’m not sure if you’re helping me; if you are, I’m grateful.)
Future:
Subjunctive: “If you were to help me, I would be grateful.” (I’m proposing that you help me, but I’m doing so indirectly, so as to make it clear that it is not expected but merely possible at your discretion.)
Indicative: “If you help me, I will be grateful.” (Just a straightforward conditional, laying out a possible course of action and a consequence of it.)
You can see that both ways of speaking of the future are possible, and both refer to the same case, but one is using the hypothetical framing to put in more distance so as to disavow any air of expectation or transaction – in other words, it’s being more passive and polite – whereas the other is simple and direct.
And this is where we see that choices of grammar are not just about what is technically correct; they are also about negotiations between people. Everything we say, we say to produce an effect, and part of that effect is a negotiation of status and expectations between us and the person(s) we’re speaking to. (Unsolicited corrections of other people’s grammar are an exemplary case and their intended effect is left as an exercise to the reader.) In the case of my example, “If you were to help me, I would be grateful,” the subjunctive is used to make a suggestion or implied request, or wish – none of which, by the way, asserts or implies that the thing is outside the realm of possibility; it simply uses the hypothetical framing to emphasize that it is not a certainty, and it does that so as not to impose or make a claim on the other person.
One more thing, though: All of this is just if you use the subjunctive. You don’t, in fact, have to; there is a version of English that simply doesn’t use distinct forms for the subjunctive. In it, you never say “if I were you”; it’s “if I was you,” even though I have never been you. This version is more common and more accepted in England than in North America, but it’s available everywhere… though it does have a less literary air to it, and it allows the occasional ambiguity, though that’s usually resolved in the next clause with the choice of tense. For example:
Subjunctive user speaking hypothetically: “If I were finished, I would stop writing.”
Subjunctive non-user speaking hypothetically: “If I was finished, I would stop writing.”
Subjunctive user or non-user using indicative: “If I was finished, then obviously I stopped writing.”
Sesquiotica 