The Mandative Subjunctive In Maritime Treaty English

The English subjunctive has shown a tendency of decline from a diachronic point of view. However, the mandative subjunctive, as a variant of the English subjunctive, is widely used in noun clauses.Based on a systematic description of the mandative subjunctive concerning its definition, classification and especially its collocation features involving its introducing mandative words, we get a full-scale knowledge about the semantic and syntactic features of the mandative subjunctive. With the application of SPSS, SNOBOL4 and FoxPro and some testing methods such as chi-square test and z test, I am able to make comparisons in a scientific way about the usage distribution of the mandative subjunctive between MTE and the other five corpora, namely MEE, NEC, LOBA, BROWNA and T4. The study shows that the most striking feature about the use of the mandative subjunctive is that the distribution of the mandative subjunctive in MTE is much higher than that in MEE, NEC or T4, and much lower than that in LOBA or BROWNA. Another feature is that the morphological subjunctive, as one of the two variants of the mandative subjunctive, is most favored in MTE.