Moods-2
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If I had a hammer, --Lee Hays & Pete Seeger |
If I were a rich man --Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick |
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If I fell in love with you --John Lennon & Paul McCartney |
If I had $1000000 --Steven Page & Ed Robertson, Barenaked Ladies |
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Were thine that special face... --Cole Porter |
Had we but world enough and time, --Andrew Marvell |
Take a good look at the sentences above. What is that "past tense" doing in the "if " clauses: had, were, fell, gave? The actions are not in the past nor are they in the present or the future tense. They are elsewhere, namely in the imagination, the world of ideals, love, and lots of money. And how is it that we recognize "If I were" or "if he were" as correct and meaningful?
For once, the grammarians have found a great term for the problem of where/when/how these actions take place: MOOD. The sentences above use the subjunctive mood. Because the English subjunctive has so few distinctive forms (only If I were, if he/she/it were, which are often replaced nowadays by If I was, if he/she/it was, plus a use of "be" for the present subjunctive that is now completely archaic: "Ïf it be so...."), it is possible to forget about it and just say that we use the past tense to talk about hypothetical situations in "if" clauses. The one set of subjunctives we use an enormous amount--could, should, would, the subjunctives of the modals can, shall, and will--are so special that we might think of them as separate verbs. In fact, there is another term in English, the "conditional," that is sometimes used for these forms (because they are always used in a main clause that has a subordinate conditional clause--an "if" clause).
You can draw on your background as a native speaker of English to understand the subjunctive mood.
In this chapter, we will complete the German moods. There are three "moods," and so far we learned the indicative and the imperative moods and the forms of the verbs. Now we focus on the subjunctive.
We haven't even talked about the indicative as a separate mood; it is the default mood, in both English and German, used in questions and answers as well as in narrations, descriptions, and statements. The indicative uses many tenses to express the exact time of an action, and it has taken us quite a while to learn it all! You use the indicative all the time.
When you have a request, or you need to tell someone to do something, you use the imperative. By its nature, the imperative only has a few forms and no tenses. The imperative is used in an interpersonal situations, to indicate the relationship between the speaker, the person addressed, and the action.
The subjunctive also has a meaning, but it has to do with the relationship between an actual situation and a hypothetical one. The subjunctive is used in certain grammatical situations, for example in some of the subordinate clauses we have just been studying!
As we said above, you can speak or even teach English without understanding the subjunctive, because it has so few distinctive forms and even those can be avoided. If you feel uncomfortable saying "If he were my brother" you can say "if he was my brother" and the verb will be understood as a subjunctive, that is, as presenting a hypothetical, imaginary situation.
In German, you can also avoid the subjunctive, but it is much more useful and important than in English, and it has kept a range of tenses to express various relationships among possibilities.