Modality and the English subjunctive in noun clauses

Abstract

The paper starts with a survey of earlier studies on the subjunctive in English noun clauses, and it promises the analysis of the parameter modality expressed by third person singular present tense verbal syntagms in a corpus of almost 550,000 words. Two models of modality are distinguished; in the first model, the relevant descriptive parameters are fact and non-fact modality, in the second root and epistemic modality. The subjunctive realises non-fact modality in the first, root modality in the second model. The application of both models to the corpus analysis yields a frequency descrease of noun clauses expressing non-fact/root modality, but only the second model, which includes meaning specifications of the competitors of the subjunctive, allows the prediction that they will probably guarantee the survival of the subjunctive.