Be that as it may: The Unremarkable Trajectory of the English Subjunctive in North American Speech

Abstract

The English subjunctive has had a checkered history, ranging from extensive use in Old English to near extinction by Late Modern English. Since then, the mandative variant was reported to have revived, while the adverbial subjunctive continued to diminish. American English is heavily implicated in these developments; it is thought to be leading the revival of the former but lagging in the decline of the latter. Observing that most references to these changes are based on the written language, we examine the diachronic trajectory of the subjunctive in North American English speech. Adopting a variationist perspective, we carried out systematic quantitative analyses of subjunctive use under hundreds of triggers. Results show that, despite the differences in their diachronic trajectories, today both types are not only extremely rare but heavily lexically constrained. We implicate violations of the Principle of Accountability in the disparities between the findings reported here and the consensus in the literature with respect to subjunctive use in North American English.

Obsolescence and abortive innovations in variationist approaches to language change

“…194–195). Kastronic and Poplack (2021) likewise find the English subjunctive ( if I were you ) to be ‘not only extremely rare but heavily lexically constrained’ in Canadian speech after a centuries‐long period of decline.…”

The Holistic Advantage: Unified Quantitative Modeling for Less-Biased, In-Depth Insights into (Socio)Linguistic Variation

“…Adverbial triggers and diachronic factors have also been identified as influential elements in conditioning the usage of subjunctives in English. Subjunctives often appear in constructions starting with words such as if, but if, as if, for if, and even if (Kastronic and Poplack 2021;Vaughan and Mulder 2014). Furthermore, subjunctive forms have exhibited a declining trend over time, particularly in British English, with American English showing a different pattern (Kastronic and Poplack 2021).…”

“…Subjunctives often appear in constructions starting with words such as if, but if, as if, for if, and even if (Kastronic and Poplack 2021;Vaughan and Mulder 2014). Furthermore, subjunctive forms have exhibited a declining trend over time, particularly in British English, with American English showing a different pattern (Kastronic and Poplack 2021). However, it remains unknown whether the specific type of trigger and diachronic factors have a bearing on the was/were variation in past subjunctives.…”

A question of change: Putting five complementary measures to the test with French polar interrogatives

“…Breadth of use can also be gauged by considering a variant’s dispersion across environments (Kastronic & Poplack, 2021:112; contextual dispersion in Travis & Torres Cacoullos [2021:1]), especially when compared with the distribution of contexts in the wider dataset (Poplack et al., 2013:165–170). For example, if an environment accounts for 30% of the data but 80% of a variant’s tokens, this would signal a disproportionate association and restricted coverage across the variable context.…”