Estabilidad del cohete

John Turner sets out to investigate the relative frequency of variants in mandative clauses in BrE in this elicitation study involving British informants at Goldsmith’s College in London. It has been an influential paper, referred to in many subsequent studies (for example, Algeo 1992, Johansson & Norheim 1988 and

Övergaard 1992, 1995), but my assessment is that it is seriously flawed from a methodological point of view and the results are unreliable.

The test consists of ten passive and ten active sentences containing verbal mandative triggers.

The results (1980: 274–276) are surprising for the high number of subjunctives found. They feature in 40 per cent of the completed responses, with only 33.7 per cent containing a modal variant and the rest indicatives. There is a marked difference between the results for the passive and active sentences.

The number of subjunctives is significantly higher in the passive sentences, where 56 per cent of the responses contain a subjunctive and only 29 per cent a modal verb. In the active sentences the proportions are almost reversed, with 24 per cent of responses containing a subjunctive, 38 per cent a modal and 34 per cent an indicative (almost all past tense).

Turner concludes from this (1980: 276) that (1) the subjunctive is certainly not extinct in BrE;

(2) there are a lot of subjunctives in the passive sentences because either (a) the formality associated with the passive encourages use of the subjunctive, or (b) the verb be ‘has remained a stronghold of the subjunctive’; (3) the common assertion that modal verbs are the most common variant in BrE is misleading, as shown not only by the number of subjunctives in the passive sentences, but also by the number of indicatives in the active sentences.

Though it can be argued that the results at least show the acceptability of the three main variants in mandative clauses in BrE, there are a number of problems with the test that undermine the validity of the findings. The first concerns the instructions on the test booklet (1980: 274, my italics):

The booklet now in front of you contains a sentence on each page. In each sentence there is a word in brackets. What you have to do is to write down the form of the word you feel is most appropriate for the sentence you have been given. For example, if the sentence is:

“He left after she (to arrive)”.

You could write “arrived” or “had arrived”. Use the word in the form that seems most natural and normal to you.

It seems to me that, despite the example had arrived in the third paragraph, asking non-linguist

informants to write down ‘the form of the word’ they feel most appropriate is much more likely to elicit a response containing a single-word subjunctive, ND or indicative form than one containing a modal construction, which involves adding another word rather than using what the informants might consider to be a ‘form’ of that word. Second, drawing any firm conclusions about a preference for subjunctives in passive sentences seems unjustified when the informants were presented with ten passive and ten active

sentences. This does not represent the ratio of passive and active sentences in language in general, where there are far fewer passive sentences. Third, as Turner states (1980: 271), he is concerned solely with the subtype of mandative clause following a past-tense matrix verb. The reason for this restriction is not made explicit, but a hint may be found in his brief discussion of the history of the subjunctive, in which he dwells on the ‘irregularity’ of the subjunctive’s not following the Sequence of Tenses, even speculating that this feature ‘undoubtedly impeded the chances of the subjunctive’s survival’ (1980: 272). The unfortunate consequence of this choice in the test is that there are no present-tense verbal triggers and no adjectival or nominal triggers. The combination of this and the instruction to choose ‘the form of the word’ may well have contributed to the relatively high number of past-tense indicatives found in the active sentences.

5.1.6 Quirk & Rusiecki (1982): ‘Grammatical data by elicitation’, and Quirk (1995): ‘A problem of modality’

Like Greenbaum (1977), Quirk & Rusiecki’s elicitation study sought to investigate factors affecting the choice of variants in environments in which subjunctives are found. Unlike Greenbaum’s study, it looked at both past subjunctives and present subjunctives in mandative clauses. The later paper by Quirk reports a follow-up study featuring a refined version of the mandative-subjunctive element of the original.

In the first study, the subjunctive-related topics were two of several investigated in a battery of elicitation tests in which students at UCL and Royal Holloway College were informants. The first topic (1982: 388) concerned the choice between were and was in remote conditional clauses. Formality had previously been suggested as one of the determining factors, for example in Quirk et al. (1972: 748), but the intention of this experiment was to establish whether relative remoteness of possibility was also important. Informants were presented with the following two sentences, and told to fill one blank with was and the other with were.

(i) After all, it’s not as if he - - - a devil with horns.

(ii) After all, it’s not as if he - - - drunk every night.

As anticipated, a significant majority of informants selected were in the first sentence, which was taken to confirm ‘a tendency to use were with the greater hyperbole’ (1982: 388). As discussed in Section 4.5.2, another interpretation would be to say that it shows that were is more likely to be used in counterfactual conditionals, as represented by the example featuring a devil. However, the forced choice makes it

difficult to give too much weight to these findings, as it is impossible to know what effect a free choice would have had on informants’ preferences.

The second topic (1982: 389–393) concerned mandative clauses and the testing of a hypothesis that choice of variant might be affected by the willingness or reluctance of the subject of the mandative clause to undertake the proposed action. There were two stages to the experiment. In the first, the informants were presented with the following sentences, which were widely separated within the larger test (1982: 389; emphasis in original):

(i) He wanted to see the play, so I suggested that he - - - -.

(ii) He was reluctant to leave, but I INSISTED that he - - - -.

As possible responses for each sentence, they were given a free three-way choice of go, should go and went. Out of the 42 informants, 27 chose different forms for the two sentences, suggesting that they might be making some sort of distinction. As the clearest difference between the two sentences was the matter of willingness or reluctance, this was taken as an indication that it was likely to be a significant factor in the choice, though it was not clear from the results in which way it affected it.

In an attempt to clarify this, the second stage of the test involved the following pair of sentences appearing three times within the test battery, this time with different two-way forced choices for the blanks on each occasion: (a) go/went, (b) go/should go, (c) should go/went.

(i) He wanted to see the play, so I suggested that he - - - -.

(ii) He was very reluctant to leave, but I suggested that he - - - -.

Though the results seemed to support the hypothesis that informants were making conscious choices related to willingness/reluctance, no clear pattern emerged. It did confirm that for most informants all three choices of mandative construction were valid options. It is perhaps notable, however, that when informants were faced with the (c) choice between should go and went, several failed to comply, and most of those who failed to comply had chosen go in (a): i.e. they had previously shown a preference for the mandative subjunctive (1982: 390–391).

The significance of this with regard to BrE is hard to assess, however, because in the introduction to the overall study, it is explained that the informants ‘included up to a dozen American students for some of the tests’ (1982: 380), but it is not made clear whether or not they took part in the tests relating to mandative clauses. It was also an unfortunate choice to use only suggest as the trigger in the examples, as it licenses both mandative and non-mandative complements and is therefore possibly

more likely to be seen with indicatives. Another limitation was introduced by using, as in Turner (1980), only past-tense matrix verbs (in both this and the follow-up study), which does not give a picture of the full range of the mandative subjunctive.

The follow-up mandative subjunctive study reported in Quirk (1995) again featured students from UCL and Royal Holloway, but this time there is no mention of AmE speakers being included. It set out not only to test the willingness/reluctance hypothesis, but also to explore the importance of the deontic strength of the mandative trigger, by using a larger range of triggers in a series of similar sentences. Additionally, a test sentence was included that featured be rather than go in the mandative clause, in order to establish whether this affected the choice of variant.

The results (1995: 142–143) suggested that in all cases, should go was the most common choice, but that there was significant variation between the subjunctive go and the indicative went. The

environment in which the subjunctive was most likely to be used was in the ‘willing’ sentences, but only in those featuring the two weaker triggers, suggest and recommend. With the two stronger triggers, urge and insist, there was no significant pattern in ‘willing’ sentences. In the ‘reluctant’ sentences, however, similar results were found for all triggers: the subjunctive was significantly less popular, while the indicative was correspondingly more popular. The conclusion drawn from this was ‘the overwhelming dominance of the “reluctant” pole in determining modality selection’ (1995: 143).

Notably, in the sentence with be, which featured the strong trigger demand, there was a

significant increase in the proportion of subjunctives selected in the ‘willing’ version, making it the most popular choice, suggesting a greater readiness to use the (perhaps more familiar) distinctive be

subjunctive than the (perhaps less familiar) subjunctive of other verbs.