Курсовая работа: The problems of the Subjunctive Mood in English
As far as the Conditional clauses are concerned they are represented by the following cases:
1. Refering to the Future – Present Tense
e.g. If I were a sentimentalist, and cared enough about Harvard to hang a photograph on the wall, it would not be of Winthrop House, or Mem Church, but of Dillon. Dillon Field House.
2. Refering to the Past Tense
e.g. If you were to tell any of a dozen girls at Tower Court, Wellesley, that Oliver Barrett IV had been a young lady daily for three weeks and had not slept with her, they would surely have laughed and severely questioned the femininity of the girl involved.
3. Refering to the mixed type
e.g. If I did not want to marry, do you imagine that I should have spent three days reading love letters from women I have never set eyes on?
There are also examples when the unreal condition is expressed with the help of inversion:
e.g. What inducement would there be for her to give up her accustomed life to accompany in exile a man of forty-nine who is by no means a beauty?
Some sentences show the use of the Subjunctive Mood introduced by as if, as though in adverbial clauses of comparison depicting the action both:
- simultaneous with the principal clause:
e.g. It was as if her exigent temperament required immediate results.
- prior to it:
e.g. Except white wine,» she proceeded as though I had not spoken.
It worth mentioning that the verb «to be» in found in two forms as «was»:
e.g. It’s not as if I was a bettin’ man.
and (what looks more Subjunctive) «were» for the person in singular:
e.g. The manager stared at him as though he were a prehistoric monster.
A number of examples are characteristic of emotional «should» usage to express surprise or indignation of the speaker about the real facts:
e.g. It’s real, but why in hell should I subject it to some arbitrary test?
Very few are sentences with the verb «wish»:
e.g. I wish I coulda seen it.
No examples were found on the use of the Subjunctive Mood in adverbial clauses of concession; attribute clauses which modify the noun of the principal clause «time» and adverbial clauses of purpose.
Conclusion
Having learned points of views of different grammarians about the Subjunctive Mood, and also about its usage, I can say that this problem is really difficult and needs solving.
Nevertheless, the problem of the Subjunctive Mood in English is really interesting. It is discussed by a lot of linguists not only of England, but Russia, Germany and other countries.
Doing my work, I found out, that English and Russian grammarians see the problem of the Subjunctive Mood in a different way. Different linguists present various quantities of Moods and give them different names.
So, I’ve managed to get acquainted with different theories on the problem of the Subjunctive Mood definition, to consider the main cases of its usage and to learn that the same verbal mood phenomena can be treated differently depending on the basic point in understanding what the Subjunctive Mood is. All these theories only prove the fact that the language is the reflection of variety of forms of human life which is manifested in the saying: so many men, so many minds.
So, before starting to collect the material on the use of the Subjunctive Mood in the works of English and American writers for chapter 3 I had expected there would be quite a lot of examples for some reasons: firstly, because it is fiction, secondly, there are some but not one author, I was going to analyze the works of with their own peculiarities in writing: their own lexical and stylistic devices, their own vocabulary. But the number of the examples I have found came as a surprise to me as it did not meet my expectations.