Past subjunctive

Question

The following text was taken from a grammar book:
"The past subjunctive is the hypothetical subjunctive. It is restricted to were,"
(Sidney Greenbaum, The Oxford English Grammar, Oxford University Press, 1996.p268)
So, the verrb in "I wishi I had more knowledge about space" is not past subjunctive. it's identified as past tense with modal meaning. Correct?

Fivejedjon · Accepted Answer

paris zhaoSo, the verrb in "I wishi I had more knowledge about space" is not past subjunctive. it's identified as past tense with modal meaning. Correct?

Grammarians differ here. My personal view is that it is not particlarly helpful to label the 'had' in your sentence as a subjunctive form. I don't think there is any value in saying that this verb form has a 'modal meaning'.

I believe that the so-called 'past tense' is in fact a distancing tense. It distances in vividness in time, in directness and in reality. In your sentence, we have an example of distancing in reality - the grammatical subject 'I' does not have more knowledge about space.

BillJ · Answer

paris zhaoThe following text was taken from a grammar book:"The past subjunctive is the hypothetical subjunctive. It is restricted to were,"(Sidney Greenbaum, The Oxford English Grammar, Oxford University Press, 1996.p268)So, the verrb in "I wishi I had more knowledge about space" is not past subjunctive. it's identified as past tense with modal meaning. Correct?

I wish I had more knowledge about space.

Yes, essentially. In your example, the meaning of the past tense "had" has to do with modality, not past time, in that it indicates a degree of modal remoteness from factuality. In any case, your example is not actually a subjunctive. Subjunctive is a clause type, as in "I demand that it be done", where the verb is the plain (infinitive) form.

BillJ

Paris zhao · Answer

Thank you, Bill. That is to say, In British english, when we construct a sentence in subjunctive mood after "wish", the only possible form is "were", Right? Another question: can the so called "putative should", a linguistic term appeared frequently in grammar book, be technically categorized as subjunctive mood? or is it just a way of expressing "subjunctiveness"? To make it more clear, is"They demande that he should be present at the Club's annual party"a sentence of subjunctive mood? My opinion is that it is not, at least theoretically. Because the mood is a grammatical category, and the sense of "subjunctiveness" in the quoted sentence is achieved by means of auxiliary construction, instead of a marked suffix. What's your opinion?

Past subjunctive

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