English Adjectival Predicates Taking Subjunctive Complements: What to Change in Curricula

Abstract

Background: Similar projects have been undertaken before with the objective to improve English instruction. However, our work is different in that a) it is based on formal theoretical premises; b) the range of the studied data goes far beyond any analogous paper; c) we compare the subjunctive uses to those of indicative and modal auxiliaries; d) we focus on adjectives and their variable selectional properties concerning the mood in complement clauses. Purpose: We use vast corpus data to reconsider the information about the English subjunctive mood in complement clauses of adjectival predicates. This is needed to fine-tune the English language curricula for undergraduate language and linguistics students, as well as postgraduate students of different areas. Method: We searched for eleven non-factive adjectives in two English corpora: the academic subcorpus of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). The latter is divided into the British and American subcorpora. The adjectives are advisable, anxious, desirable, eager, essential, imperative, important, necessary, obligatory, urgent, vital. We manually sorted the findings in such a way as to discard all unsuitable, wrong, and deficient contexts relying on syntactic and contextual analysis. Then we calculated the number of occurrences of each structure of interest (the subjunctive mood, modal auxiliaries, the indicative mood) after the adjectives. Finally, we analysed the patterns and made appropriate generalisations for further didactic implementation. Results: We found that the selectional preferences of the adjectives under study fall into three distinct groups: for modals (anxious, desirable, eager), for the indicative (essential, important, vital), for the subjunctive (the rest). We also came across some by-products in our analysis: modal agreement between predicates and auxiliaries in complement clauses; an unexpected contrast in adjectival selectional patterns across the English varieties; a cross-variety robustness of our generalisation concerning the makeup of the established classes. Conclusion: The conclusions must be taken into account in designing English for Academic Purposes curricula with the new information replacing outdated facts. It should be made clear that English does not have predicates solely selecting for the subjunctive. This statement is corroborated by a fairly regular variation of mood patterns in complements of non-factive adjectives stemming from certain semantic features inherent in them. However, the nature and the realisation of such features in grammar is to be further tested in linguistic theory.

Keywords

• generative linguistics
• corpus-based study
• mood and modality
• subjunctive mood
• adjectival predicate
• selectional property