Eighteenth-Century English Grammarians and the Subjunctive Mood

Abstract

Scholars generally agree that the inflectional subjunctive has experienced a steady decline in the history of English. For a long time, however, there has been dissent on the development of the subjunctive during the age of prescriptivism; in other words, scholars have been concerned with the question of whether the rules laid down in eighteenth-century normative grammars have had an influence on the development of the form. Turner claims that the subjunctive ‘continued to lose ground throughout the 18th and 19th centuries […] in spite of the predictable efforts by some of the early English grammarians to arrest the decline’ (Turner, 1980, p. 272). This view is not shared by Strang, who maintains that the trajectory of decline of the subjunctive was sporadically reversed. She attributes this reversal to the influence of normative grammarians and the ‘tendency to hypercorrection in 18c and later teachers and writers’ (Strang, 1970, p. 209). A similar argument is proposed by Gorlach who states that the subjunctive forms became ‘slightly more frequent in the 18th century’ and that ‘their survival was partly supported by the acceptance of Latin-based rules of correctness’ (Gorlach, 2001, p. 122). Then again, Traugott contributes to the discussion that there was no clear consensus among early grammarians, as the following comment shows: ‘It is interesting to see how varied opinions on the subjunctive were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (Traugott, 1972, p. 180).