[Corpora-List] Subjunctive mood detection

[Mike Maxwell]

Taras Zagibalov wrote:
> I am looking for any papers regarding Subjunctive mood detection.
> Is there any way to find phrases describing unreal but desirable 
> situations (like "I wish you were here")? The problem is that it's not 
> possible to do with key words (e.g. word "wish" might be used in "I wish 
> good luck to you" which is not what I am looking for). Modal verbs are 
> not good indicators either as they describe probability / possibility of 
> something rather than what is absent but desirable: "I may/might/can go" 
> vs "I wish I went" or "I wish I could go". It looks like some grammar / 
> patterns may be more reliable than key-words.
> Any suggestions and ideas are appreciated.

"Subjunctive mood" is a grammatical distinction, nearly dead in English. 
  "Unreal but desirable situations" is a pragmatic quality.  There is 
not a direct correspondence.  The subjunctive, which really is only 
distinguishable with the verb "to be" and first or third singular 
subjects in the past tense, can equally encode unreal but UNdesirable 
situations, like "If I weren't here, he wouldn't have a clue what to 
do."  And of course lots of unreal and undesirable situations get 
described without the help of the subjunctive.

So I think the thing to do is to start with a clear idea of what you're 
looking for, and then test the intuition by hand-annotating some text. 
A google search reveals lots of grammatical descriptions of English 
subjunctive, like
    http://www.ceafinney.com/subjunctive/guide.html
(This also talks about the use of uninflected verbs as a sort of 
subjunctive, which I think is vanishingly rare in modern English.)

or here:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_subjunctive
Again, some of the forms they discuss (their "circumstances" 1, 3 and 4) 
are exceedingly rare.
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
    --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist

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