Subjunctive(?): not critical that

[JAMES A. LANDAU Netscape. Just the Net You Need.]

On Sat, 22 Mar 2008 at 16:40:43 Zulu minus 4 Dennis Preston <preston at MSU.EDU> wrote:

This entire message assumes that the subjunctive
is intact in Spanish and apparently used by all,
unfortunately on the basis of a single Spanish
teacher's instructions! (My favorite bit of
sociolinguistics for quite some time is is "How
seriously? My Spanish teacher...."). That would
equate studying the drift of living languages by
asking what their teachers taught. In fact, the
Spanish subjunctive it is rapidly disappearing in
nearly all varieties of spoken Spanish. Good
riddance!

This was in response to my comment:

Spanish is a language that takes the subjunctive seriously.  How
seriously?  My high school Spanish teacher had us spend several weeks
studying nothing but the subjunctive, ending with the longest take-home
exam I have ever had.  It was at the end of those weeks that I first
felt that I spoke Spanish, because I could now say so much more than
before the exercise started.

My response:

What I said was that I personally felt that I was beginning to master Spanish once I had emerged from that weeks-long torture session on the subjunctive.  Specifically once we ended that sesstion we went into Spanish history, and I discovered while doing homework assignments and essay exams that I could express myself in Spanish much better and with a wider range of possibilities now that I knew the (textbook) rules of the subjunctive.  This was MY conclusion, not my teacher's.

>From Spanish history we went into the literature of the Siglo de Oro and the Generacion de 98, so I can't really claim to concentrated on contemporary spoken Spanish.  And in fact if the subjunctive is "rapidly disappearing" in present-day Spanish, then it must have still been alive and kicking back in 1962.

In any event I was using century-old literary Spanish usage to make a point about the why? of the subjunctive mood, not about contemporary Spanish usage.

Also I stated:  the so-called *subjunctive mood* in English is not
a true subjunctive but rather a grammatical idiosyncracy which is rarely
used to distinguish two moods of a verb, and should be referred to as a
*pseudo-subjunctive*.

Since you say "good riddance" to the subjunctive, you should be applauding my statement.

If the subjunctive is rapidly disappearing from spoken Spanish, what is taking its place?  Not aspect, since the Spanish verb has only two aspects and one of them is about as rare as proper (i.e. prescriptivist) usage of the English subjunctive.

Aside to Laurence Horn:  You give the examples

    She insists that he not take his medicine
    She insists that he does not take his medicine.

Indeed the difference between the two is in the aspect of the verb.  A prescriptivist, however, would render the latter as:

    She insists that he do not take his medicine.


           James A. Landau
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           Northrop-Grumman Information Technology
           8025 Black Horse Pike, Suite 300
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