History of the Present English Subjunctive

Download or read book History of the Present English Subjunctive written by Lilo Moessner and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Locating the subjunctive at the interface of mood and modality, this book presents a systematic description of the use of the English subjunctive in main clauses, noun clauses, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses. It explores the factors which governed its competition with other verbal expressions in texts ranging from the 9th to the beginning of the 18th century. Employing close reading alongside analysis of corpus data and the use of descriptive statistics, it offers new insights into the research landscape of English subjunctive use and into the fields of historical English linguistics and corpus linguistics.