Chinese EFL Learners’ Use of Subjunctive Markers in Writing

Abstract

The paper aims to investigate some aspects of subjunctive mood in English and Chinese and examine how Chinese EFL learners perceive them through collecting 60 compositions. In this paper the right subjunctive markers (S-markers) refer to the past tense verbal forms in the subordinate clause, and the past tense modality form in the main clause, which excludes the incorrect S-markers: the present tense either in the subordinate or in the main clause, or in both, and the absence modal verbs in main clause. The findings of the survey reveal that their accuracy rate of S-markers is rather low. I mainly ascribe the high incorrect rates to the following factors: the discrepancy between tense and time in English, a different paradigm of expressing future time, tense and aspect denoting the degree of certainty of the utterances, the complicated modality system in the main clause, the past tense in if-conditionals, and the negative transfer from Chinese subjunctive mood, which lacks inflectional verbal forms.