A Comprehensive Study Of The Subjunctive Mood Of The English Language

[Abstract] The subjunctive mood, with the development of Modern English, seems to be more and more unimportant. Some grammarians, both at home and abroad, think that the notion of the subjunctive mood is a simple transfer from Latin and has no place in English grammar. Others do not elaborate on this subject in their grammatical books, although they do not agree with the former school of grammarians who treat the subjunctive mood as unimportant. However, most traditional grammarians hold that the subjunctive mood, which has been active in the English language for many centuries, is one of the necessary grammatical categories of the English language.The writer of this paper is of the same opinion as these traditional grammarians, for we cannot deny the existence of the subjunctive mood, as it meets the demands of the definition of a grammatical category and it is not completely the same as the other two mood forms (indicative and imperative) in form and meaning, though it is occasionally similar to the indicative mood or the imperative mood in the verb forms. Since the subjunctive mood is still active in Modern English of various styles, we Chinese learners of English have no reason whatsoever to ignore its existence.For the reasons mentioned above, this paper sets out to discuss the usage and the classification of the subjunctive mood.