use of the subjunctive in contemporary american english

APLING 629: Structure of the English Language

Use of the Past Subjunctive in Contemporary American English

Professor Charles Meyer

Apostolos Koutropoulos3/3/2009

Introduction

The subjunctive is quite an interesting mood, and one that has presented many problems when I

was learning romance languages. In English the subjunctive seems pretty straight forward to me, yet

many times when I watch television or listen to the radio many people seem to misuse it. People tend to

use was where they are supposed to use were. For this paper I have looked at a handful of usage guides,

including the American Heritage Book of English Usage, and I have examined both print and spoken

transcriptions from the Corpus of Contemporary American English to see if usage follows the rules in

these usage manuals.

Usage Guidelines

The three sources consulted for this paper are Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference (1995), the

American Heritage Book of English Usage (1996) (AHBEU) and Bernstein’s The Careful Writer (1995). All

of these resources agree upon the definition of the subjunctive mood as “being associated with

condition, command, wish, doubt, desire, possibility, and the like.” (Bernstein) The specific usage that I

am going to analyze is the past subjective which AHBEU calls the were subjunctive “since were is the only

subjunctive form that is distinct from the indicative past tense.”

The AHBEU tells us that a traditional rule for use is to use “were rather than was in a contrary-

to-fact statement that follows the verb wish: I wish I were (not was) lighter on my feet.” What I find

interesting about this use is that “[m]any writers continue to insist on this rule, but the indicative was in

such clauses can be found in the works of many well-known writers.” In addition, in Hacker we see

another distinction between formal and informal use of the past subjunctive. The examples given in

Hacker indicate that was is informal while were is formal.

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Formal: I wish that Dr. Kurtinitis were my professor.

Informal: I wish that Dr. Kurtinitis was my professor.

One final interesting thing to note about the past subjunctive usage is dependent on the

intended meaning of the sentence. The example used in AHBEU is: “If Hamlet was really written by

Marlowe, as many have argued, then we have underestimated Marlowe’s genius.” I think that this

coincides with Hacker’s rule that states “do not use the subjunctive mood in if clauses expressing

conditions that exist or may exist.” In the example above the author of the sentence, by using was

instead of were, is expressing his view that Hamlet was in fact written by Marlowe, or at least he

believes that there is a high probability that it was written by Marlowe. Taking all of this into

consideration when talking about the use of the past subjunctive shows us that there is no clear black-

and-white rule for how to interpret a was past subjunctive. Is it an incorrect use? Is it Informal use? Or is

the author trying to say that something is not contrary to fact?

Actual Usage

I have broken down my analysis of the usage of the past subjunctive into two areas: those

instances where past subjunctive is used in print media and those used in spoken media. I have further

broken down the print usage into a category that contains magazine, fiction, and newspapers and

another category that contains academic writing. My instinct, prior to research, was that spoken text

would be the most informal, and therefore I would find more was subjunctives. In academic writing, it

being more formal, I would find the most were subjunctives, and the category encompassing magazines,

newspapers and fiction was a gray area in the middle of these two other categories. As examples of

usage I searched the corpus for if expressions, and expressions using wish. Two examples are if [personal

pronoun] was/were… and I wish [personal pronoun] was/were.

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Spoken Usage

The first usage I researched was spoken language. I created a number of searches to compare

the if [personal pronoun] was construction to the if [personal pronoun] were construction. According to

all sources that I referenced, this construction should be in the past subjunctive unless there is some

sort of connotation that what is said is indeed believed to be true. My second set of comparisons circled

around the comparison of the I wish[personal pronoun] was construction to the I wish [personal

pronoun] were construction. My initial instinct told me that in spoken language it would be more likely

to see was instead of were.

In my analysis of the if [personal pronoun] was/were constructions, the first thing I noticed from

the results was that the first person singular usage of the past subjunctive was almost fifty-fifty, with a

majority of people using the past subjunctive in a manner that is prescribed in the usage manuals. (see

appendix for figures) Examples of incorrect usage are “If I was younger I'd go over and help” (ABC

Sunday news), and “I guess if I was in that position, what would I look for?” (ABC 2020).

The interesting thing I discovered is that people tend to have a problem with third person

singular form of the past subjunctive. The usage manuals tell us that the correct form should be “if

he/she/it were,” however the analysis shows that people tend to use “he/she/it was.” Within that third

person singular, it seems that the neuter and the feminine forms were most troublesome. In both these

cases, the occurrences of incorrect use were almost double those of the correct use. Examples of such

instances are “If it was up to me, I would have him under arrest right now sitting” (NBC dateline) and “…

she doesn't have the opportunity to fully establish herself as if she was doing twice as much, twice as

many stories…” (CNN King).

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While looking through the transcripts I also found a number of instances where the correct form

was indeed was because the sentence was either referring to the past, and not to a hypothetical or the

validity of the condition was questioned. Thus, this was not an instance of the subjunctive. An example

of this is on a Geraldo transcript where the following sentence appears: “But if it was so premeditated,

why so sloppy?” In this instance, I interpret this sentence as a rhetorical hypothetical. It is phrased as a

hypothetical but the speaker obviously does not believe in the validity of this hypothetical.

Finally, there was a small amount of sentences that dealt with the second person singular,

second person plural, first person plural and third person plural that used was instead of were in the

formation of a past subjunctive. Examples of these sentences are: “What if they was white and they

were exactly that, you would have a problem?” (Springer) “If we was to lose that portion of our income,

that wouldn't be good” (CBS 60 minutes II) and “…and if you was hollering, why didn't he come down?“

(Geraldo) From these sentences, I would guess that the speakers here are using African American

Vernacular English. In this case, I would say that the rules prescribed in the usage manuals deal with

Standard Written English, thus they do not apply to African American Vernacular English and the

argument can be made that these constructions can’t be marked as examples of incorrect usage.

In the analysis of the I wish [personal pronoun] was/were constructions I also found something

quite interesting, something that I would not have expected. The trends that I saw in the if [personal

pronoun] was/were constructions don’t apply to the I wish [personal pronoun] was/were constructions!

For example, speakers tend to favor if it was as opposed to if it were. In the I wish [personal pronoun]

was/were analysis, people tend to prefer to use I wish it were instead of I wish it was. A couple of

examples of incorrect usage are: “I wish it was my twenty-fifth birthday, but it's not,” (PBD_Tavis) and “I

wish it was easier for her” (NPR NewsNotes). The second person singular past subjunctive is also used

correctly in all instances. Speakers overwhelmingly used the I wish you were construction instead of the I

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wish you was. There were only two instances of I wish you was however both appear to be African

American Vernacular English.

Finally, I found it interesting that while people tended to favor the correct form of the if

[personal pronoun] was/were construction when using it with the first person singular, in the I wish

[personal pronoun] was/were construction people favored the incorrect construction I wish I was

instead of I wish I were. Two examples are “I wish I was not a public figure. I wish I was not an actress,”

(ABC Primetime) and “I wish I was there.” (CNN_King). These are counterfactual conditions and they

should be “I wish I were not a public figure” and “I wish I were there.” However as Hacker pointed out, it

is possible that these sentences were spoken in an informal way, and thus was may be acceptable

usage.

Print Usage

When I was analyzing my preconceptions about print usage, my hypothesis was that Fiction

would be closest to spoken usage due to the nature of writing, Academic usage would be closer to the

prescribed usage found in usage manuals, and Newspapers and Magazines would be somewhere in-

between these other two genres, probably leaning more towards the Academic genre than the spoken

genre.

In the Academic texts I was not expecting to find any I wish [personal pronoun] was/were

constructions because of the nature of academic texts. I was surprised to find these constructions, few

as they were, but I hadn’t considered that there would be quotation in academic texts. There are

instances where the past subjunctive is incorrectly used, for example we see “You made me. I wish I was

dead. I wish we were all dead.” (AmerScholar) These instances are fewer than instances of correct

usage. Some examples of correct usage are: “I wish I were happy,” (Raritan) “I wish I were fatter,”

(CurrentPsych) and “Sometimes I wish I were not gay.” (DrugIssues)

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When analyzing the if [personal pronoun] was/were constructions, it surprised me that there

were many instances of incorrect past subjunctive usage in these academic texts. There are many

sentences that appear to not be quotations, yet the prescriptive rules are not followed. For example we

see “the South had to act as if it was stronger, more unified and more radical than it actually was”

(IntlAffairs) and ‘In addition, students were asked if it was legal to possess pirated software and if they

believed copyright laws were…” (InfoSystems). In a sense, I would expect to see some incorrect usage by

authors in Information Technology related journals compared to more traditional humanities

publications. There were of course instances of incorrect usage due to quotations, and I expected those

to follow the same patterns that I saw in spoken texts.

Looking at magazines and newspapers as genres, I expected them to fall somewhere between

the more rigid academic genre that tends to follow prescriptive rules, and a more liberal spoken genre

that is more fluid. For the if [personal pronoun] was/were constructions it appears to that people tend

to prefer the past subjunctive for counter factual information, as is described in the usage manuals. In

magazines, what struck me, was the fact that the use of the third person singular neuter is used

correctly twice as many times as it is incorrectly used. In newspapers this usage is split fifty-fifty.

In both newspapers and magazines the ratio of correct to incorrect usage for all pronouns,

except for the use of the third person singular neuter as previously discussed, is almost split fifty-fifty.

What I noticed was that it may not be the author’s mistake, but the informants that they were quoting.

Some examples of this are:

“And if it was any other place, as I told Anne, I would've quit,” (MotherJones)

“They beat a black woman in there. Would you shop there if it was your wife?” (NationalReview)

“The CIA called her a “sadistic nymphomaniac” (" Even if I was, what has that got to do with the government? ")” (Ebony)

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“I don't care if it was my brother in the White House, I would not slant the news” (NewYorkTimes)

“If I was to give FEMA a grade like you and I got in school” (SanFransisco)

The same holds true for the I wish [personal pronoun] was/were constructions. There are a

number of counter factual wish statements in both magazines and newspapers. The quotations appear

to be things that are said by the informants that the reporters use, and thus the incorrect usage parallels

that of spoken texts. For example we see sentences like “God, I wish I was young again,” (Chicago) and

“This is a dangerous world, I wish it wasn't.” (Rolling Stone) The interesting thing to note is that in

Newspapers the ratio of incorrect past subjunctive usage to correct usage is higher with this

construction compared to magazines. Magazines tend to use this construction according to usage

manual prescriptions more of the time. I wonder if this is related to the intended audiences of the two

different genres.

Finally, the last written text type that I analyzed was Fiction. Going into this analysis I expected

fiction to be closer to spoken language usage. Much to my surprise, there were more instances of

prescriptively correct usage than incorrect usage. The trends I noticed in spoken texts, namely that the

third person singular past subjunctives tended to use was instead of were, did not hold true for works of

fiction in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Even in the third person singular, the preferred

usage seems to be the correct usage.

In fiction, more so than academic writing, newspaper and magazine text, I also saw a number of

instances of what I would consider African American Vernacular English. We see instances where was is

used in counter factual sentences with plural pronouns like in the following sentences:

“If we was at home, nigger, it be a.357 to the membrane” (Triquarterly)

“If we was playing for money, I wouldn't” (SouthernRev)

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“Kind of magic, man, if you was here in the yard and seen it.” (HarpersMag)

In these instances, just like spoken text, I have a hard time classifying these instances of use as

incorrect usage because African American Vernacular English is an English dialect and as a dialect it has

distinctive traits that make it different from Standard Written English which is what our usage guides

are aimed towards.

Conclusion

In the end, I have to say that it was a bit difficult to see an overarching trend in the usage of the

If [personal pronoun] was construction versus the If [personal pronoun] were construction. In spoke

English it was easier to see trends and to exclude non subjunctive pasts. However, in written texts this

task was much more difficult because you can’t easily query the author to see if they are being informal

in their writing, if they don’t believe that what they are writing is counter-to-fact, if they are being

creative in their use of language, or if they are simply ignorant of the prescriptions in the usage manuals.

There is also the debate as to whether or not you should treat a dialect of English, such as

African American Vernacular English, with the same set of rules as you would treat Standard Written

English. In my opinion, you wouldn’t. Of course, one would not write a research paper in AAVE, but they

may very well write a novel or a short story in AAVE, so it depends on the genre of what is written that

determines what rules you apply.

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Appendix

SPOKEN LANGUAGEIf it was: 1991 If it were: 1098

If I was: 991 If I were: 1192

If he was: 933 If he were 665

If she was: 387 if she were 181

If you was: 24 If you were: 2386

If we was: 6 If we were: 862

If they was: 1 if they were: 1422

Total: 4333 Total: 7806

I wish I was: 68 I wish I were 37

I wish it was 29 I wish it were 41

I wish he was 11 I wish he were 9

I wish she was 6 I wish she were 2

I wish you was 2 I wish you were 29

I wish we were 14

I wish they were 8

Total 116 Total 140

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FICTIONIf it was 2431 If it were: 2721

If he was 2164 If he were: 2705

If she was 1522 If she were: 2187

If I was 1333 If I were: 1683

If you was 60 If you were 1462

If they was 17 if they were: 2276

If we was 9 If we were: 700

If hers was 2 If hers were 2

If ye was 1 if ye were 1

If theirs was 1 If ya were 1

if s/he were 1

If he/she were 1

If himself were 1

Total 7540 Total 13743





I wish you were 62

I wish we were 14

I wish they were 9

I wish mine was 1 I wish hers were 1

Total 125 Total 241

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MAGAZINEIf it was: 700 If it were: 1241





If yours was: 1

If hers was: 1

If we were: 436

if they were: 1126





I wish she were 3

I wish you were 8

I wish we were 2

I wish they were 4

Total 22 Total 52

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NEWSPAPERIf it was: 807 If it were: 916





If they was 3 If we were: 385

If his was 1 if they were: 969

If yours were 1






I wish you were 2

I wish we were 8

I wish they were 9

Total 47 Total 51

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ACADEMICIf it was: 364 If it were: 829





if they were: 1073

If he/she was 1 If s/he were 4

If we was 1 if we were: 298

If ye was 1

If theirs was 1




I wish you were 3

I wish we were 1

I wish they were 1

Total 7 Total 20

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use of the subjunctive in contemporary american english

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