Abstract
Based on the definition of the subjunctive as a realisation of the grammatical category mood and an expression of the semantic/pragmatic category modality the book presents the first comprehensive and consistent description of the history of the present English subjunctive. It covers the periods Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE), and it considers all contruction types in which the subjunctive is attested, namely main clauses, noun clauses, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses. Besides numerically substantiating the well-known hypothesis that the simplification of the verbal syntagm led to a long-term frequency decrease of the subjunctive, it explores the factors which governed its competition with other verbal expressions. The data used for the analysis come from The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts; they comprise nearly half a million words in 91 files. Their analysis was carried out by close reading, and the results of the analysis were processed with the statistical program SPSS. This combined quantitative-qualitative method offers new insights into the research landscape of English subjunctive use and into the fields of historical English linguistics and corpus linguistics.
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