Question e-mailed by Edsel Ocson, who describes himself as an
interested reader (April 12, 2014):
In your recent article about media people and the subjunctive
mode (“Some
recurrent misuses of the English subjunctive”), I found the following
sentence: “It would really be a shame if an otherwise well-written reportage or
well-argued commentary is needlessly
undermined by faulty subjunctive construction.”
Don’t you think the word “is” in the above sentence should
be changed to “were”?
My reply to Edsel Ocson:
No, the “is” in that sentence of mine shouldn’t be changed
to “were” because it’s not a subjunctive sentence but a conditional sentence in
the indicative mood. A conditional sentence is the type of sentence that conveys the idea that the action in the
main clause can take place only if the condition in the subordinate clause—the
“if”-clause—is fulfilled; its mood is indicative because it denotes acts and
states in real-world situations, as in that sentence of mine that you are
asking about. On the other hand, a subjunctive sentence is one that denotes
acts or states that are contingent on possible outcomes of the speaker’s wish,
desire, or doubt; it is in subjunctive sentences using an “if”-clause that the
verb “be” exhibits maverick behavior, sticking to the past-tense
subjunctive form “were” all
throughout, regardless of the person and number of its subject.
This sentence of mine is in the indicative mood because, as
I indicated earlier, it denotes an act and a state in a real-world situation:
“It would really be a shame if an otherwise well-written reportage or
well-argued commentary is needlessly undermined by faulty subjunctive
construction.” It belongs to the type of conditional sentence called the zero conditional (certainty), which
denotes a condition whose result is always true and always the same. In such
conditional sentences, the “if”
clause states the condition in the simple present tense, is followed by a
comma, then is followed by the result clause also in the simple present tense,
as in this basic example: “People get dehydrated if they don’t drink water” or,
in the inverted form, “If people don’t drink water, they get dehydrated.” The
sentence of mine that’s in question here has precisely the same conditional
form: “It would really be a shame if an otherwise well-written reportage
or well-argued commentary is
needlessly undermined by faulty subjunctive construction” or, in the inverted
form, “If an otherwise well-written reportage or well-argued commentary is needlessly undermined by faulty
subjunctive construction, it would really be a shame.” (Here, as a nuance, I used “would” as a weaker form of the
present-tense indicative “will.”)
Now I will
explain why the word “is” in that sentence of mine can’t be changed to
“were,” a change that conceivably would make it a subjunctive sentence. It’s because
that sentence describes the outcome of an act or state in a real-world
situation, making it indicative in the conditional sense. If we revise that
sentence to describe the outcome of an unreal situation or idea contrary to
fact, then it would become a subjunctive sentence that uses the subjunctive
“were” instead of the indicative “is.” A usual way to do that is to express the
condition as a wish: “Deeply embarrassed, the reporter wished that his otherwise well-written reportage or well-argued
commentary were not needlessly undermined
by faulty subjunctive construction.”