Datos de entrada y datos de salida

American linguist John Algeo’s 1992 elicitation study has at its centre a rerunning of Turner’s (1980) test, this time involving AmE speakers. It is notable for the initial discussion in which he examines the different approaches of British and American researchers towards the subject, highlighting the assumptions and judgements that the speakers of one variety have tended to make about the other.

It is also unusual in paying particular attention to the indicative variant in mandative clauses, which he memorably describes as a ‘Briticism’ (1992: 611).

In his discussion of British and American perceptions of the mandative subjunctive, Algeo states that:

British attitudes towards what is widely, if inaccurately, perceived to be the American option are noteworthy as exemplifying the more general emotional entanglements between the two national varieties. (Algeo 1992: 602)

To demonstrate ‘British attitudes’, he refers to some British usage guides that warn against using the mandative subjunctive, despite the fact that, as far as Algeo is concerned, it is part of normal BrE usage.

From the Oxford Guide to English Usage, he picks out the following advice:

Beware of constructions in which the sense hangs on a fine distinction between subjunctive and indicative, e.g.

The most important thing for Argentina is that Britain recognize her sovereignty over the Falklands.

The implication is that Britain does not recognize it. A small slip that changed recognize to recognizes would drastically reverse this implication. The use of should recognize would render the sense quite unmistakable. (Weiner 1983: 179)

Algeo dismisses the likelihood of such slips and goes on to suggest that should would actually be more ambiguous for all varieties of English because it could be mistaken for ‘the should of moral obligation’

(1992: 602). Another analysis would be to say that Weiner’s example covers two separate points: that items such as important are ambiguous because they can take both mandative and non-mandative complements, and that in BrE the subjunctive is not as familiar as the should variant. Weiner considers that the insertion of should would make the example clearer for a BrE speaker, which seems reasonable enough advice in a usage guide aimed at BrE speakers. Algeo’s claim that the ‘subjunctive in this and similar constructions is in fact the clearer option’ (1992: 602) can only be said to be valid in varieties of English in which the mandative subjunctive is the norm. His concern about the possibility of mandative should being misinterpreted as deontic should perhaps reveals an important difference between the

varieties (see discussion in Section 3.4.2). The underlying problem in Algeo’s analysis here is that, from the evidence of the rest of the article, he is overestimating the frequency of the mandative subjunctive in BrE because he is relying on the skewed figures presented in Turner (1980).⁸

Algeo takes exception to the following paragraph⁹ from the entry on the subjunctive in one of the most popular British usage guides in the second half of the twentieth century, Ernest Gowers’s The Complete Plain Words:¹⁰

It is remarkable – for it seems contrary to the whole history of the development of the language – that under the influence of American English the use of the subjunctive is creeping back into British English. (Gowers 1986: 139)

He reads the loaded expression ‘creeping back’ as implying that ‘the subjunctive has been exiled to the colonies’ and that ‘from there it is making a surreptitious and probably ill-intentioned re-entry into Britain’ (1992: 603). Though his tongue is at least partly in his cheek, Algeo’s reaction against the perceived British bias of grammars and usage guides at this time is perhaps understandable, as is his complaint that the phrasing in The Complete Plain Words seems to imply that AmE is not part of ‘the whole history of the development of the language’.¹¹

Before introducing the results of his own study, Algeo addresses some of the unattributed speculative explanations for the revival of the mandative subjunctive that were reported (without comment or endorsement) by Turner:

It is beyond the scope of this survey to investigate in detail the reasons for this development. Economy of effort, a predilection for archaic expressions – especially those which most effectively serve to distinguish the British and American varieties – the influence of immigrants’ home dialects and languages are some of the stimuli which have been suggested. (Turner 1980: 273)

Algeo dismisses the idea of ‘a predilection for archaic expressions’ among AmE speakers as ‘ethnocentric nonsense’, and it is hard to disagree. He rightly points out that the fact that a usage is considered archaic

8 See discussion of Turner (1980) above (Section 5.1.5). The findings of Turner are also queried by Övergaard (1995: 76).

9 Also mentioned by Turner (1980: 271).

10 The edition of The Complete Plain Words that Algeo refers to is the third, revised by Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut in 1986. The passage in question was not written by them or by Gowers, however. It appeared for the first time in the second edition, revised by Bruce Fraser (Gowers 1973: 150).

11 This British attitude can also be detected in The King’s English, Kingsley Amis’s typically idiosyncratic ‘guide to modern usage’ published a few years after Algeo’s paper: ‘Be careful with any American writings, which often indulge in subjunctive forms, especially if the context seems precise or public in any way. Do not imitate them. If necessary, mentally translate them into familiar indicative English. Any sentence with a subjunctive form in it (e.g.

“it was decided that we adjourn” rather than “that we should adjourn”) is suspect. N.B.: The above rules are not flippant or satirical’ (Amis 1997: 260).

in one variety of English is irrelevant for those using another variety in which it is current. He also understandably rejects the idea that ordinary AmE speakers would know that this use of the subjunctive is considered a marker of difference from BrE.

His general complaint about these ‘pseudo-explanations’ is that ‘the explainers have taken current British usage as the norm for English and so assume that departures from that norm require an explanation . . . The American use of the mandative subjunctive requires no explanation if it is simply the continuation of a once general feature of English grammar’ (1992: 604). The first part of this complaint, about taking BrE as the norm, is a fair point, but a number of later studies, including Övergaard (1995) and Hundt (2009), have shown that the assumption implicit in the second part is not correct: it appears that the mandative subjunctive had all but disappeared from both BrE and AmE in the nineteenth century, only to be revived around the beginning of the twentieth century in AmE and then later in BrE, apparently under AmE influence, which is what the attitudes of the British usage commentators were reflecting.

Algeo’s own study of mandative clauses (carried out in 1988 but reported in this paper for the first time) is a response to a suggestion by Turner (1980: 276) that comparative studies in other varieties of English were needed. Accordingly, Algeo took Turner’s elicitation test and administered it to a group of native speakers of AmE. The same test sentences were used – ten active, ten passive – although with very slight changes to avoid vocabulary that was deemed confusingly British. The preliminary

instructions were also essentially the same. In particular, the arguably misleading instruction to ‘write down the form of the word’ was unaltered. This, as I suggested in the discussion of Turner (1980) in Section 5.1.5, made it less likely that informants would use modal constructions when filling the gaps. In Algeo’s test, however, it turns out that it probably had less effect, as later studies (e.g. Johansson &

Norheim 1988) have confirmed that the modal variant is not a common option in AmE anyway, and as a consequence, Algeo’s results can be seen to be considerably more robust than Turner’s.

Algeo’s conclusions from these results (1992: 610–611) include the following: (1) the mandative subjunctive was preferred by an overwhelming majority of his AmE informants: 90 per cent of their responses used the subjunctive, compared with 40 per cent of Turner’s; (2) whereas in the BrE results the subjunctive was favoured in the passive sentences, the question of voice was irrelevant in the AmE results; (3) indicative forms featured in only 2 per cent of his informants’ responses; (4) only 7 per cent of his responses involved modals, which suggested that while this was an option in AmE, it was ‘a minor and unfavored one’. Overall, he concludes that AmE ‘does not offer much choice in mandative constructions. The subjunctive is the norm’ (1992: 611).

The final section of Algeo’s paper argues that the most interesting difference between AmE and BrE preferences in mandative clauses concerns not the subjunctive or modals, but BrE use of the indicative, which is ‘foreign . . . to American grammatical usage’ (1992: 616). His dismissal of the indicative variant as ‘foreign’ should be questioned, however. When he discusses the 18 responses that did feature indicatives, rather than accept them as evidence of a low level of indicative use, he suggests reasons why the responses could have been mistakes, putting several down to the confusing use of triggers such as insist, propose and suggest that can take both mandative and non-mandative

complements, and pointing out that no such indicatives were found in responses from faculty members,

‘who can be expected to respond in a linguistically more normal way’ (1992: 611). On the face of it, such an analysis seems to exhibit the same kind of bias he was complaining about in British usage guides of the time. Later studies have also shown that the indicative variant is regularly found in other varieties, such as New Zealand English (e.g. Hundt 1998a: 93–94).

Algeo goes on to cite numerous recent examples of indicatives in mandative clauses from British newspapers. For him, then, it is not the subjunctive in AmE that should be considered a departure from the norm, but the use of the indicative in BrE: ‘it is British rather than American English which has the unique and noteworthy grammatical forms when it comes to this construction, and it is these forms which necessitate further study’ (1992: 616).¹²