Análisis de resultados

Marianne Hundt extends mandative subjunctive studies to New Zealand English (NZE) in a section of this corpus-based monograph on the grammar of that variety. The section features two synchronic studies:

one comparing NZE with BrE and AmE using large newspaper databases, the other comparing NZE with AusE and AmE using standard million-word corpora.

In a preliminary discussion of the difficulties involved in defining the variables in mandative clauses, the author addresses the question of what to do with non-distinct forms (NDs). She notes that Johansson & Norheim treated them separately, but does not seem to be aware that their NDs apparently included some examples that by her own explanation of iST would have been categorised as subjunctives (see Section 5.2.3).³⁰ She points out that if NDs are not included among the variants when looking at mandative clauses ‘the relative frequency of the remaining options increases. This produces more pronounced preferences (for the subjunctive in Brown and for the periphrastic variant in LOB)’ (1998a:

91). She does not make clear whether that should be considered a good or bad thing, but it could be argued that it gives a less accurate picture of the choices facing speakers.

Hundt also mentions the need to distinguish between mandative and non-mandative uses of some triggers and considers the possibility of including non-finite complementation, in particular to-infinitives, as variants following mandative triggers, but concludes that because of the practical difficulties involved in identifying comparable environments ‘it seems a perfectly legitimate approach to limit the analysis to finite subordinate clauses’ (1998a: 92).

The data for the first study comes from newspaper databases containing samples from the 1990s:

from the Dominion and Evening Post (Dom/EVP) for NZE; from the Guardian for BrE; and from the Miami Herald for AmE. One of the obvious advantages of these corpora is that they are much larger than million-word corpora such as Brown and LOB, which is potentially important when dealing with a low-frequency phenomenon like the subjunctive. On the other hand, they are restricted to one text type,

30 Hundt’s example of an iST subjunctive has a first person singular subject, showing that for her iST does not apply only with a third person singular subject: When my own worry lines began to deepen recently, Donna suggested I take up jogging with Rob. <WCNZE K29> (1998a: 90).

newspaper writing, and so are not as balanced and representative as Brown and LOB are intended to be.

The results, therefore, should not be taken to apply to all text types in the national varieties.

Instead of simply using the Johansson & Norheim (1988) triggers, Hundt takes a two-stage approach to the identification of mandative clauses. The first stage involves a broad search of the Dom/EVP database for ‘the syntactic patterns which may trigger a mandative subjunctive in AmE’

(1998a: 92), counting only unambiguous subjunctives. In the second stage, working from these Dom/EVP results, she selects a subset of five triggers that occur most frequently with the subjunctive and then searches for equal numbers of mandative clauses following those triggers in all three databases.³¹

Table 5.4. Absolute frequencies for three variants in mandative clauses after five selected triggers in newspaper corpora from New Zealand, Britain and the USA in the 1990s.*

Hundt

Hundt takes the results, displayed in Table 5.4, to confirm previous findings that the mandative subjunctive is more common in AmE than in BrE, and that should is the preferred variant in BrE.

However, as she points out, it also shows that BrE is not alone in using indicatives. While the few indicative examples in the AmE database all involved verbs that can also take non-mandative complements, examples in NZE were unambiguously mandative. She concludes that the ‘indicative can therefore hardly be claimed to be a Briticism’ (1998a: 93).

31 The number of mandative clauses searched for in each database for each trigger was 25 for insist, 28 for

important/importance, 50 for demand, 84 for recommend/recommendation, 65 for suggest/suggestion (1998a: 92).

As far as the mandative subjunctive is concerned, the results indicated that NZE was closer to AmE than to BrE, though the should variant was still fairly common.³² NZE was found to be closer to BrE when it came to the use of the subjunctive with be. In both varieties, around 60 per cent of

subjunctives involved be, whereas in AmE the figure was 50 per cent. Similarly, NZE and BrE were both shown to be reluctant to use preverbal negation. There were eight examples in the AmE database, but only two in the NZE database and none in the BrE database.

The aim of Hundt’s second study involving mandative subjunctives was to see how NZE compared in this regard with the other major Southern Hemisphere national variety, AusE, and how both varieties compared with AmE, the variety believed to have the highest use of mandative subjunctives.

Unfortunately, the description of the data involved in the study raises a few questions, as do the results themselves.

The data for AusE was apparently taken directly from the analysis of ACE in Peters (1998) and so, for the sake of comparison, the 17 verb (and associated noun) triggers that featured in that study were used in Hundt’s analysis of NZE from the Wellington Corpus (WCNZE). The variants were restricted to subjunctive and should, and the AmE results, taken from the analysis of Brown in Johansson & Norheim (1988), were modified to restrict them to those triggers. All of this seems reasonable, but a comment about the identification criteria muddies the waters. Hundt states that she follows Peters in so far as ‘cases with first and second person³³ subjects in the subordinate clause were included [as subjunctives]

whenever they occurred in a disambiguating past-tense context’ (1998a: 96). This does not seem to reflect the fact that Peters (1998: 92) kept a separate record of forms that could be identified as subjunctives by iST but did not include them in her subjunctive figures. As there is considerable doubt about whether Johansson & Norheim relied on iST for anything other than third person singular subjects (as discussed in Section 5.2.3), it seems very likely that in this study Hundt’s subjunctive figures and those she took from other studies for comparison were not all based on the same criteria. Another apparent discrepancy is that the figures for ACE in Hundt’s results table, as summarised in Table 5.5, do not seem to tally with those reported in Peters (1998: 93), the supposed source, even if Peters’s unmistakable subjunctives and those

32 In the discussion of these results, Hundt refers to an elicitation test that provided some of the data for the book:

‘Interestingly, the should variant was not perceived as a Briticism by the American informants of my elicitation test . . . The New Zealand informants did not single out the mandative subjunctive after interest . . . as typical of AmE, either. Even though regional variation in this area of grammar has long been recognized by linguists, it does not seem to rank high in the minds of speakers when asked to identify regionalisms’ (1998a: 94).

33 It’s not clear why cases with third person plural subjects are not included.

identifiable by iST are combined.³⁴ Given the references to Peters’s paper as ‘Peters (forthcoming)’, it could well be that Hundt was working from a non-final version, but whatever the reason, it seems clear that care should be taken when referring to Hundt’s results.

Table 5.5. Absolute and relative frequencies of subjunctive and should variants in mandative clauses after selected verbs and nouns in NZE, AusE and AmE.*

Hundt

Hundt’s analysis of her results indicates that regarding the mandative subjunctive there is no statistically significant difference between the AusE and NZE or the AusE and AmE results, yet there is a significant difference between AmE and NZE, which suggests to her that ‘AusE has come closer to the pattern observed in AmE of the 1960s than NZE’ (1998a: 97).

5.2.8 Hundt (1998b): ‘It is important that this study (should) be based on the analysis of parallel corpora: On the use of the mandative subjunctive in four major varieties of English’

Hundt’s three-part paper begins with the first diachronic study of mandative clauses based on truly comparable electronic corpora, which distinguishes it from Övergaard’s mixture of electronic corpora and personally collected written texts. This became possible after the (near) completion of the F-LOB (BrE) and Frown (AmE) corpora containing written texts from 1991 and 1992, respectively, which allowed results from those corpora to be compared with the results for LOB and Brown in Johansson & Norheim (1988). The second part of her study is a synchronic investigation of the mandative subjunctive in four major varieties of English, in which the new results for BrE and AmE from F-LOB and Frown are compared with the AusE results from the analysis of ACE in Peters (1998) and those for NZE from Hundt’s own study of the WCNZE corpus (Hundt 1998a). In the third part, she examines data from all of

34 The figures reported in Peters (1998: 93): 78 unambiguous subjunctives, 19 subjunctives identifiable by iST and 29 should variants.