Calculo de un turborreactor

Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 1002–1004) list four environments in which modal preterites and past subjunctives are regularly found in PDE: (1) remote conditionals (which include clauses introduced by not only if but also provided, as/so long as, on condition, assuming, supposing, in the event and in case); (2) complements licensed by wish; (3) complements licensed by would rather/sooner/as soon;

(4) complements licensed by it BE time (that). In this section, I present some evidence that present subjunctives can also be found in the last two environments, particularly in AmE, despite there being little reference to this in recent grammars.

4.4.3.1 It’s time

The construction with it BE time (that) is mentioned by Quirk et al., but only in a footnote. Referring to the example repeated here as (113), they point out that the ‘were-subjunctive cannot replace the

hypothetical past in constructions introduced by It’s time (that)’ (1985: 1013), a judgement that is also made by James (1986: 83–84).²⁶

(113) It’s time I was in bed.

As mentioned in Section 2.2, this claim is challenged to some extent by Huddleston & Pullum (2002:

1004) when they state that the construction ‘hardly allows an irrealis’, supplying (114), a rare example from a British newspaper, before adding (without specifying in which variety) that examples ‘are also occasionally found of mandative should or a present tense instead of the modal preterite’ (2002: 1004).

By ‘present tense’ they seem to mean indicative, and there is no mention of the possibility of a present subjunctive form in this environment.

(114) It’s high time the true cost of the monarchy were pointed out.

Early evidence that the situation in AmE is not being adequately accounted for in such descriptions comes from American linguist George Curme, who includes a present subjunctive as the first of four possibilities after it BE time (that): ‘“It is high time that he go’ (or more modestly went, or were going, or should go)’ (1931: 405). More recently, Jacobsson states that, while the modal preterite is normal in PDE, in ‘rather more formal English the present subjunctive is still usable’ (1975: 222–223), before supplying three clear present subjunctive examples from recent AmE sources, including (115), his (5):

(115) It is time that the present director no longer be the director.

(Time, 4 April 1971)

Evidence based on a little more data comes in a book by Algeo surveying differences between AmE and BrE (2006: 257). He presents four possibilities in PDE content-clause complements after it BE time:

modal preterites, present subjunctives, present indicatives and a construction with should. In support, he reports the findings of a small study using AmE and BrE texts from the Cambridge International Corpus, which indicate that the ratio in the BrE texts of ‘preterit to nonpreterit verbs’ was 8:1, while that in the AmE texts was 1:2. This seems to show that AmE uses a wider range of complements in this environment, but exactly what proportion of those is made up of present subjunctives is not clear.

26 Jespersen supplies an example that shows that this was not necessarily true at the end of the nineteenth century: ‘It is high time that the omission were supplied’ (1931: 123). The example is from R. L. Stevenson’s The Merry Men (1887). More recently, Jacobsson claims that although ‘subjunctive were is still possible in sentences like It’s time he were gone, the indicative form was is now preferred’ (1975: 222).

More solid corpus-based evidence for the range of options available in this environment in AmE is supplied by an earlier study by Lavelle & Minugh (1998), which used large corpora of newspaper writing from the 1990s to investigate complementation after high time in three national varieties: AmE, BrE and AusE.²⁷ They found that modal preterites were strongly favoured in BrE and AusE newspapers, appearing in 93 per cent and 88 per cent of the relevant clauses, respectively. The proportion of present indicatives (or at least non-distinct forms) was 6 per cent for BrE and 9 per cent for AusE, with just a few distinctive present subjunctives found: two for BrE (1 per cent) and one for AusE (3 per cent). For AmE, the proportion of modal preterites was significantly lower, at 60 per cent, and the proportions of present indicatives (31 per cent) and present subjunctives (9 per cent) correspondingly higher (1998: 224).²⁸ With such a low-frequency construction, large corpora (of more than 35 million words each) were required to provide sufficient data, but the evidence of present subjunctive and present indicative use in this

environment in AmE – as in (116), found in the OED (s.v. freedom), and (117) and (118), from COHA – suggests that further investigation could be worthwhile, particularly if other variations such as it be time/it be about time/it be past time are included:²⁹

(116) It’s high time we take back our country . . . from the fear-mongering, freedom-hating neocon criminals who have hijacked the Republican Party.

(OED, Anchorage Daily News, 7 July 2007) (117) It’s about time the secretary of state position be considered for restructuring.

<COHA, 2002, Chicago Tribune>

(118) It’s about time I start to look like a grown-ass man.

<COHA, 2002, Is the bitch dead, or what?>

4.4.3.2 I’d rather

The evidence regarding use of the present subjunctive with would/’d rather is not as strong, and recent reference grammars do not include it as an option. Quirk et al. treat would/’d rather as one of their

‘hypothesis verbs’, alongside wish and suppose, which ‘may be followed by a that-clause containing a verb in the hypothetical past or the were-subjunctive’ (1985: 1183). Huddleston & Pullum have it only in

27 Note that other variations – such as it BE time/it BE about time/it BE past time – were not included.

28 Though the possibility of clauses containing should in this environment is acknowledged in the study (Lavelle &

Minugh 1998: 216), it is not clear whether such clauses are included in their figures.

29 Native-speaker-intuition-based support for the existence of the present subjunctive and present indicative as viable options in this environment can be found in the comments on two blogposts on Language Log by Geoffrey Pullum (2009) and Arnold Zwicky (2009).

combination with a modal preterite and past subjunctive (2002: 148, 1003–1004, 1128), and in the student textbook version of their grammar actually state that with would rather ‘the modal preterite is

grammatically obligatory’ (2005: 47).

Evidence that this may not be the case in AmE – though the examples used are artificial rather than from a corpus – is provided by Givón (1993: 276), who claims that there is a subtle difference between (119) and (120), his (94a) and (94b), concerning the uncertainty of the speaker and the resistance of the subject of the content clause:

(119) I’d rather she go somewhere else.

(120) I’d rather she went somewhere else.

(121) I’d rather she not come.

(122) I’d rather that she (*should) be there with you.

As a BrE speaker, I have to say that I find (119) of borderline acceptability, and the same applies to (121), Givón’s (91e). When Radford, another BrE speaker, discusses (122), his (47), he suggests that the version with should is not acceptable to him (2009: 109), thereby implying that the version without should, involving a present subjunctive, is acceptable, but again for me this does not feel natural. Nevertheless, the fact that corpus examples such as (123)–(125) are reasonably easily found suggests that the Givón and Radford examples may not be unrepresentative, at least of AmE, and that further investigation, using very large corpora such as COCA, would be worthwhile.

(123) ‘Would you rather that a kid resell shoes, or sell drugs?’ ‘I’d rather he stand in line and sell shoes.’

<COCA 2012, Associated Press>

(124) ‘From what I know right now, if it were my kid, I think I’d rather he get the vaccine than chicken pox,’ Dr. Orenstein said.

<COCA 1993, New York Times>

(125) I am as small as she is when it comes to this, but I would rather she not know, so I do not talk at all.

<COCA 1990, TriQuarterly>