Imperative and Subjunctive in Contemporary English

Abstract

Certainly the central interests, and the characteristic procedures, of linguists and those of grammarians are different. Yet grammarians do take linguistic theory into account. Friesist and Trager-Smith-Hillist structural theory was inevitably unattractive to traditional grammarians: the structuralists attacked the tradition at every point. The quarter century of structuralist dominance in what structuralists liked to call ended in 1957, and less than a decade later Wallace L. Chafe could write, in his review of Robert E. Longacre's Grammar Discovery Procedures,2 that the schools with large numbers of adherents within present-day American linguistics included only the transformationalists grouped around Noam Chomsky and the tagmemicists grouped around Kenneth L. Pike. From Zellig S. Harris's Co-occurrence and Transformation in Linguistic Structure3 to Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass., 1965) and Cartesian Linguistics (New York, 1966), transformational theory has been both imaginative and, from a traditional point of view, constructive. Here one finds breadth, flexibility, even modesty. Tagmemic theory, too, is attractive to traditional grammarians. Grammarians do take linguistic theory into account, and linguists do concern themselves with specific problems of grammatical analysis in particular languages. At least at advanced levels, since 1951 the most successful new American textbooks dealing with English grammar have almost invariably been linguistically based, and either structural or transformational-not yet tagmemic-in approach. Traditional grammar barely survived the matricidal structuralist attacks of the forties and fifties, so that near the end of this period Paul Roberts, then the most energetic of structuralist textbook makers (and now the most energetic of transformationalist textbook makers), could write in a chapter of Understanding English unsympathetically entitled Gram-