Stephanie was here. I wish Stephanie were here. Tim picks up the dry cleaning. It’s imperative that Tim pick up the dry cleaning. You are on time. It’s crucial you be on time. Have you ever noticed ...

For grammar bullies “the subjunctive” is sacred ground. Reforms proposed for the British national curriculum in 2012 required teaching use of the subjunctive not later than sixth grade. People seem to ...

One of the most fascinating things about language is that we can use it so well, so expertly, without understanding how we do it. The following two sentences are perfect examples. If the burglar was ...

READING a story on the fate of European newspapers, your columnist was drowning in bad news—newsrooms decimated, advertisers fleeing—but then a strange sentence appeared: Even Rupert Murdoch, who ...

Sometimes, what might have been never stops mattering. By Jean Chen Ho I’ve always had an unstable relationship to time. Maybe that’s because in Chinese, my first language, verbs aren’t conjugated.

After a full-dress review of the subjunctive in the preceding chapters, this form of the English language should no longer hold any terrors for us. With a clearer understanding of its uses and ...

Phuc Tran grew up caught between two languages with opposing cultural perspectives: the indicative reality of Vietnamese and the power to image endless possibilities with English. In this personal ...

It is often bemoaned in Britain that English is going to pieces—and Americans are generally to blame. Whether you call it decline or not, the moaners are on to something: America has indeed produced ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract Subjunctive clauses of many Romance and Slavic languages show subject obviation phenomena; that is, the requirement that a pronominal subject ...