Crawford (2009): ‘The mandative subjunctive’

Crawford’s contribution to Rohdenburg and Schlüter (2009) involves a large-scale corpus investigation of mandative clauses in AmE and BrE, taking a different approach from most previous studies. As such, it is potentially of great interest, but unfortunately some of the methodological decisions have rendered the results unreliable and arguably misleading.

The corpora analysed are the British and American newswriting subcorpora used in the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al. 1999), both of which have more than 5.5 million words from the 1990s. The aim is to investigate how complementation following mandative triggers varies according to not only national variety, but also word class and individual trigger. He also proposes the concept of ‘strong’, ‘moderate’ and ‘weak’ triggers, though what these terms denote seems to change within the chapter, apparently switching from ‘subjunctive’ triggers to ‘mandative’ triggers.

54 See Section 3.4.1 for discussion of the question of finiteness and the subjunctive.

His criteria for the identification of both mandative clauses and subjunctive forms potentially undermine the findings of his study. The first level of his classification of content clauses found after triggers divides these into ‘general mandative’ and ‘non-mandative’, which on the face of it seems reasonable. The ‘general mandative’ type consists of ‘mandates’, which are viewed as ‘any clause in its finite verb form that explicitly addresses the fact that some person or entity wants a particular action to be taken or a certain event to happen’ (2009: 259), i.e. a functional/semantic definition. There are three types of mandate: clauses containing (1) subjunctives, (2) should (and shall), (3) must (and have to). The ‘non-mandative’ category consists of two types: (1) clauses containing non-mandative modal verbs (e.g.

could), (2) ‘other’. Crucially, ‘other’ includes clauses containing indicatives and non-distinct forms (2009: 260).⁵⁵

The reason he gives for including non-distinct forms in the non-mandative category is that he has decided to take a strictly formal approach to the identification of subjunctive forms, applying only iNO-S and iBE. (Notably, he does not use iST or iNEG as criteria, though he does not explain why.) But the fact that a form is ambiguous between subjunctive and indicative does not mean that the clause containing it is necessarily ambiguous between mandative and non-mandative. Here, as elsewhere, he seems to be confusing subjunctive clauses and mandative clauses. He has set up a semantic definition of ‘mandates’

(see above), yet he uses formal criteria for categorising clauses as mandative. As a result, his non-mandative clauses seem likely to contain a large number that, by his own semantic definition, should be considered ‘mandates’: not only the subjunctives identifiable by iST and iNEG, but also a proportion of those containing non-distinct forms and indicative forms.

Discounting all indicative forms as non-mandative is bound to have a considerable effect on his results for BrE, because previous studies have shown the indicative to be a significant variant in

mandative clauses (e.g. Algeo 2006, Hundt 1998b). The effect of his choice is revealed in his first general findings. As expected, when comparing the varieties, he finds that subjunctive counts are higher for AmE than for BrE and that should counts are higher for BrE than AmE, following all three word classes (verbs, nouns, adjectives). When looking at the variants within each variety, he finds that the overall counts

‘illustrate the strong preference for the subjunctive in all three word classes in AmE and the somewhat equal distribution of subjunctive and should complement clauses in verbs and nouns in BrE, but a

55 Rather troublingly, one of the examples he gives (2009: 259) to illustrate a clause containing a non-distinct form, or what he calls an ‘ambiguous subjunctive’, does not contain a form that could be taken as subjunctive at all (his example (3), my underlining): Last night police virtually ruled out a suggestion that the intruders were poachers.

Clearly, were here can only be a past indicative form, following a non-mandative use of suggestion.

preference for should complement types with adjective triggers’ (2009: 262). It seems to me that ‘equal distribution’ gives a misleading picture of the situation in BrE, as it ignores indicatives (as well as some subjunctives and ND forms).

To be fair, Crawford does note that in his figures, the BrE ‘other’ category is much bigger than in AmE and he is aware of some of the reasons why this might be. But he dismisses it as a problem on the grounds that adopting a different method for determining subjunctives would ‘move some of the “other”

group to the subjunctive category in AmE as well, so there is still a strong preference for expressing mandates with the subjunctive in AmE’ (2009: 262). It is reasonable to say that the picture of AmE having a preference for the subjunctive is unlikely to be changed, but the argument seems to assume that it doesn’t matter because there isn’t much difference between BrE and AmE attitudes towards indicative forms in mandative clauses, when many studies have shown that there is a great difference.

To decide on the triggers to be used in the study, he starts with a list of 108 produced by collating those mentioned in Quirk et al. (1985: 155–158, 1182, 1224) and in Appendix 2 in Övergaard (1995: 95–121). Only those triggers that were followed by at least one subjunctive in Crawford’s corpus were included in the study (2009: 261).⁵⁶ In the first main strand in his study he compares the proportions of his mandates (featuring subjunctives, should, must/have to) and those clauses in his non-mandative group (featuring other modals and ‘other’: indicatives and NDs, plus iST-subjunctives and iNEG-subjunctives that are not also marked as subjunctive by iNO-S or iBE). This is done first by word class and then by individual trigger.

The word-class figures (2009: 263) show that AmE has a greater proportion of mandates than BrE after verb triggers (almost 40 per cent in AmE; just over 20 per cent in BrE) and after noun triggers (55 per cent in AmE; 24 per cent in BrE). After adjective triggers the proportions are the same (20 per cent). Following his earlier general finding about the varieties’ preferences, he interprets this as showing that ‘AmE not only has a preference for the subjunctive . . . but also expresses more overall mandates with the triggers that condition the subjunctive’ (2009: 263). But this has to be understood within the limitations imposed by his own definitions of ‘mandate’. It would be interesting to know how the figures would change if BrE mandative indicatives were included as mandates, and also the NDs and other discounted subjunctives. Would this bring the BrE figures up to the AmE figures for verbs and nouns?

56 VERBS: ask, decide, demand, determine, dictate, ensure, insist, order, propose, provide, recommend, request, require, suggest, urge, wish; NOUNS:advice, condition, decree, demand, insistence, mandate, proposal, recommendation, request, requirement, suggestion; ADJECTIVES:concerned, determined, essential, imperative, important, vital (Crawford 2009: 275–276).

Does it mean that BrE actually has more mandates after adjectives than AmE? If differences remain, does this indicate different preferences in the two varieties regarding other forms of complementation

following these triggers, in particular infinitival complements?

It is when looking at the results for individual triggers that he introduces his concept of trigger strength, apparently according to the proportion of complement clauses that are ‘mandates’ (2009: 263–

264). The reference points he chooses are 65 per cent and over for ‘strong’ triggers, 40–64 per cent for

‘moderate’, under 40 per cent for ‘weak’. This is a potentially interesting approach, but there are a number of problems with it as it stands. First, his limited definition of ‘mandate’ means that it is not a true picture of the proportion of clauses that are semantically ‘mandative’. Second, the use of ‘strong’ and

‘weak’ is unfortunately liable to be confused with more familiar concepts of deontic strength. Third, use of a proportional count rather than absolute frequencies can produce some apparently odd results, particularly when the frequencies involved are low. To illustrate this, Table 5.12 shows, for three selected triggers, actual frequencies next to ‘mandate’ proportions.

Table 5.12. Complementation after three triggers in British and American corpora of news writing from the 1990s: absolute frequencies and ‘mandate’ proportions (mand. %).*

Crawford (2009)

‘mandative’ ‘non-mandative’

subj.

should/

shall

must/

have to

other

modals ‘other’ total mand. %

urge BrE 7 1 0 1 0 9 89%

AmE 19 1 0 2 4 26 77%

insist BrE 13 14 8 31 136 202 17%

AmE 24 1 7 33 118 183 17%

suggest BrE 7 42 1 105 228 383 13%

AmE 27 21 0 136 168 352 14%

* Absolute frequencies taken from Table 14.3 (2009: 275); mandative proportions taken from Figure 14.2 (2009: 265).

Because of the mandative proportion, this table shows urge to be a ‘strong’ trigger in both varieties, whereas previous studies, such as Hundt (1998b: 173), have found it to be among the least productive as far as frequency is concerned. And the high percentage for urge in BrE also obscures the big frequency difference between the two varieties. The results for suggest and insist are revealing for another reason.

The studies of Hundt (1998b: 173) and others find that they tend to be among the most productive triggers as far as subjunctives are concerned, yet Crawford’s analysis categorises them as ‘weak’ triggers. This is surely because of the large number of clauses found in Crawford’s ‘non-mandative’ categories. Both verbs can take mandative and non-mandative complements. If the truly non-mandative clauses – which could never feature subjunctive forms – are removed from Crawford’s figures for these triggers, which apparently has not been done, it is likely that a very different result would be found.

With so many reservations about the methodology, it is difficult to rely on the discussion of Crawford’s findings for individual triggers, whether regarding ‘mandative’ vs ‘non-mandative’ or variants within ‘mandative’. What seems to me to be of potential interest is where there are big differences between varieties. The tables showing raw figures (2009: 275–276) offer some insight into this, but the limited criteria used for identifying subjunctives, the discounting of mandative indicatives and the fact that the corpora contain only news writing render even these of limited value.

His more general observations (2009: 272–273) are perhaps of greater interest. He shows that as far as word classes are concerned, mandative clauses are found most frequently after verbs, followed by nouns and then adjectives. Furthermore, the triggers that are most productive in this respect are also the triggers in which BrE is likely to use the same variant as AmE (usually subjunctive), whereas after the least productive triggers, BrE is likely to use a different variant (usually should).