Mind Your Language | 22 August 2009

Forming part of my husband’s baggage-train en route for another medical ‘conference’, I read a novel by an American. It contained this sentence: ‘It requires that a very real dynamic and active union exists.’ It could have been worse: it might have employed the subjunctive.

I have nothing but affection for the subjunctive. I sing ‘God Save the Queen’ with the best of them. Yet it is odd that the subjunctive has not only undergone a revival over the past 100 years, particularly in the United States, but is pushing out perfectly respectable items of English syntax.

It is most commonly found as the so-called mandative subjunctive, in a subordinate clause (usually introduced by that) following an expression of command, suggestion or possibility. So I’d have expected the beastly novelist to write ‘active union exist’.

As that entertaining quartet, Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik point out in their Grammar of Contemporary English: ‘The mandative subjunctive in that clauses has only one form, the base.’ In other words it’s: ‘I exist, you exist, he exist, we exist, you exist, they exist.’ In form, this is identical to the infinitive, and so nobody turns a hair if instead of saying, ‘that an active union exist’, a speaker says, ‘that an active union should exist’. The part of speech represented by exist has thus been turned from a subjunctive to an infinitive, without frightening the horses.

If it had been left to me, though, I should have been inclined to employ an accusative and infinitive construction for this ghastly clause in the first place, so that it would read: ‘It requires a very real dynamic and active union to exist.’ Of course, in English, oblique cases only show up among pronouns: requires me (him, her, me, us, them) to exist.