The Subjunctive, Should and the Indicative in Dependent Imperative Clauses - the Changes in British English Between the 1960s and 2008
Abstrakt
There are three possible realizations of verb phrase in English dependent imperative clauses: the mandative subjunctive, the construction with should and the indicative. The aim of the paper is to re-examine the dependent imperative clause and the different forms of the verb phrase used in it in BrE, with special attention to the mandative subjunctive and the construction with should.
Using three diachronically comparable corpora, the paper focuses on the development of the distribution of these variants from the 1960s, through the rest of the 20th century, to the first decade of the present century. The research shows that in BrE the distribution of mandative constructions constituting dependent imperative clauses has significantly changed during this period.
The construction with should decreased markedly between the 1960s and the 2000s, most prominently so in the category of press. The results also confirm the expected increase in the use of subjunctive but only in the second half of the 20th century, not after 1990s.
Since1990s, there is a significant number of construction that could be formally both the subjunctive and the indicative and the expected increase cannnot be confirmed.