Forming part of my husband’s baggage-train en route for another medical ‘conference’, I read a novel by an American. It contained this sentence: ‘It requires that a very real dynamic and active union exists.’ It could have been worse: it might have employed the subjunctive.
I have nothing but affection for the subjunctive. I sing ‘God Save the Queen’ with the best of them. Yet it is odd that the subjunctive has not only undergone a revival over the past 100 years, particularly in the United States, but is pushing out perfectly respectable items of English syntax.
It is most commonly found as the so-called mandative subjunctive, in a subordinate clause (usually introduced by that) following an expression of command, suggestion or possibility. So I’d have expected the beastly novelist to write ‘active union exist’.
As that entertaining quartet, Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik point out in their Grammar of Contemporary English: ‘The mandative subjunctive in that clauses has only one form, the base.’
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