The evolving grammar of the French subjunctive

Abstract

This paper compares the evolution and contemporary distribution of subjunctive and indicative in spoken Quebec French with the development of normative injunctions on variant choice over five centuries of grammatical tradition. The subjunctive has been prescribed with hundreds of lexical governors, verb classes and semantic readings since the 16th century, but in spontaneous speech, it is virtually limited to a handful of matrix and embedded verbs. Our analysis shows that the overriding determinant of variant choice is not meaning, as most would claim, but the lexical identity of the governor. The only other factors that play a role are those pertaining to the construal of the context as canonical for subjunctive (e.g. suppletive morphology, presence of the complementizer que, and adjacency of main to embedded clause); where these are present, subjunctive is favored. Quantitative discrepancies among governors and embedded verbs, their previously undocumented associations (or lack thereof) with the subjunctive, and the unpredictable mood preferences they display at different points in time have all conspired in obscuring community patterns. Once actual usage facts are systematically analyzed, however, the grammar of subjunctive selection emerges as regular and stable. Its discrepancies with respect to both normative and theoretical linguistic accounts stem from attempts to impose the doctrine of form-function symmetry on a phenomenon which is inherently variable.

When a linguistic variable doesn’t vary (much): The subjunctive mood in a conservative variety of Acadian French and its relevance to the actuation problem

“…Beyond its semantic role, another aspect of the subjunctive is regarding its status in the language in terms of change. Some work has argued that the subjunctive mood is disappearing in some varieties of French, including Ontario French (Laurier, 1989) and in Acadian and Louisiana French (Neumann-Holzschuh, 2005;Neumann-Holzschuh and Mitko, 2018), or that it is stable (i.e., not disappearing) (Poplack, Lealess, and Dion, 2013). Since the present paper adopts a 8 variationist approach to the subjunctive mood, the following section will outline some of these issues in the variationist literature on the French subjunctive mood.…”

“…2 Another topic of discussion is whether the 2 Laurentian French refers to the varieties spoken in the Canadian provinces of Quebec, Ontario, in western Canadian provinces as well as in New England in the United States. These varieties are distinct from Acadian subjunctive mood has a semantic function in the language to express modality or whether it is simply lexically conditioned and devoid of any modality-related meaning (e.g., Poplack, 1992Poplack, , 1997Poplack, Lealess, and Dion, 2013). The present paper will consider all of these claims in turn by analyzing use of the subjunctive mood in one of the most conservative varieties of Acadian French, that spoken in the Baie Sainte-Marie region in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.…”

“…Among the various semantic analyses, some linguists posit the existence of a realis feature (Lalaire, 1998), a certain and factual feature (Lachet, 2010), or an assertion feature (Abouda, 2002). Conversely, some have argued that it has no semantic function at all and that it is simply lexically conditioned (Poplack, Lealess, and Dion, 2013). Beyond its semantic role, another aspect of the subjunctive is regarding its status in the language in terms of change.…”

From language standards to a Standard Language: The case of Modern Greek

“…There are also significant studies that seek to diagnose the effects of prescriptivism on language change: Anderwald (2014Anderwald ( , 2016, Hinrichs, Szmrecsanyi & Bohmann (2015), Curzan (2014), Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2006); see also the works by Stuart-Smith listed in the bibliography, which seek to establish whether mediation is a contributory factor in language change. Anderwald (2016), Hinrichs, Szmrecsanyi & Bohmann (2015), Poplack & Dion (2009), Poplack, Lealess & Dion (2013) are some of the most important recent works that seek to demonstrate the effects of prescriptivism by correlating two types of language corpora: prescriptive texts containing corrective instructions (as they occur in Usage Guides and traditional Grammars of the English language) with historical language corpora. I believe that the performative theory of standardization developed in this chapter could provide a unifying framework for the diverse approaches to prescriptivism evidenced in the relevant literature.…”

Refunctionalization and Usage Frequency: An Exploratory Questionnaire Study

“…The low productivity of obsolescing constructions is necessarily correlated to the loss of their original grammatical function. For instance, consider the loss of subjunctive mood in Canadian French (Poplack 2001;Poplack et al 2013). In comparison to European French, the subjunctive is used considerably less frequently in Canadian French.…”