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Neil Coffey questions whether or not the (so-called) English subjunctive really constitutes a subjunctive mood, and suggests that what people typically refer to by the term 'subjunctive' is not a single phenomenon but several different phenomena.

Few things annoy me more than to hear, “If I was you ...” Most who actually know that there exists a verbal mood called the subjunctive agree that it appears to be vanishing in common usage. Earlier in the twentieth century, grammarians and linguists proclaimed the subjunctive's death and argued that this was no big loss, as its historical role in English had been weak and inconsistent; some even went so far as to say that in Modern English its usage is “pretentious”.

This appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59:473-93, as a response to four papers in a symposium on my book The Conscious Mind. Most of it should be comprehensible without having read the papers in question. This paper is for an audience of philosophers and so is relatively technical. It will probably also help to have read some of the book. (There is a corresponding precis of the book, written for the symposium.)

A very traditional view of modal verbs

This paper explores the relationship/s between modality and ideology in two versions of the same political text: one in Arabic, the other, a translation of it into English. The main argument springs from the premise that the speaker’s choice of modal expressions signals both the degree and type of involvement a speaker has in the content of her/his message, and consequently her/his ideological stance/s.

This paper was written to investigate the meaning and implications of the use and instruction of modals in the English language. This investigation will not attempt to provide a discourse on modals/modality to the reader. Rather, it will provide an overview of modals/modality and then analyze the issues and implications of modal usage and instruction in the classroom.

One of the most difficult aspects of learning English is modality. Throughout this paper, we attempt to carve out a working understanding of the English modal system. In order to do this, we need to juggle theory, research, and pedagogy the way a clown juggles at a circus.

This piece argues that the subjunctive is dead in modern English.