Subjunctive Mood And Distanciation: Problems And Solutions

Subjunctive mood has long been regarded as a difficult grammatical category in English. Chinese learners of English are often confused at it because of the distinctions between Chinese and English and diversified views towards subjunctive mood among grammarians at home and abroad.In order to help students understand subjunctive mood and to improve its teaching, the analysis of it is done from the"distanciation"perspective."Distanciation"refers to the change of the verb form to create a psychological distance between physical realities, so as to realize hypothesis, suggestion, wish, or euphemism, and other pragmatic purposes. The psychological distance that the speaker or the writer holds for physical realities either remote or close is expressed by the change of the verb form used to indicate temporal distance. Analyzing subjunctive mood from the"distanciation"perspective is an explanation of meaning implied in subjunctive utterances.The validity and feasibility of teaching subjunctive mood from the"distanciation"perspective is proved by an experiment, in which fifty freshmen majoring in Laws participate in it. Twenty five students in the Experimental Group receive the"distanciation"approach and twenty five students in the Control Group receive the widely accepted"three types"classified by ZHANG Daozhen. The pre-test and post-test data is analyzed with SPSS software, from which the results show that the Experimental Group perform better than the Control Group in the understanding and application of English subjunctive mood.It is expected that the findings and discussions in the present study sheds light on the teaching of English grammar.