Category: Language Notes

The term “subjunctive” refers to one of the grammatical “moods” that color the verb in a sentence.  Verbs in the subjunctive mood indicate that the action or state described by the verb is hypothetical or counter to reality (e.g., “They proposed that the city build a new bridge,”  “If I were you, I’d buy it”). In English, there are five moods:  indicative, subjunctive, imperative, interrogative, and conditional.  Grammatical mood is something that indicates a certain perspective on what is being said.  It has to do with things like what is considered to be real, what one desires or recommends to become real, what would be real under a particular condition, or what one knows to be purely hypothetical or impossible.  For example, verbs in the indicative mood express what is considered reality (“I listened to the song twice,” “She’s going to stop at the store on her way back.”)  Verbs in the imperative mood (e.g., “Listen!” “Stop!”) indicate that what is being said is a request, and verbs in the subjunctive mood, again, indicate that the action or condition is hypothetical–perhaps proposed but not currently real–or counter to reality altogether.

The verb of a sentence can show its “mood” by the form that the verb takes.*  In English, verbs have relatively few unique forms, however, so it is not always easy to judge the mood of a verb simply by looking at its form; still, there are some ways to identify the operation of the subjunctive mood.  In the following sentences, the verbs in italics are in the subjunctive mood, which explains why there is no “-s” at the end of verbs in the third person singular as one would expect if they were in the more typical indicative mood in the present tense.  Notice also how negatives are formed with these italicized verbs.

They demanded that she leave immediately.

He insisted that they not drive in the snow storm.

She asked that he be more punctual in the future.

The lawyer recommended that she not sign the document just yet.

The council proposed that the city expand its bus service.

The school requires that each student provide proof of immunization.

The sentences above contain forms in what is called the present subjunctive. Present subjunctive forms look exactly like the infinitive form of a verb (without the word “to”).  Below are all the present subjunctive forms of the verb “to be” with their associated subjects.

I be	you be
he be	we be
she be	they be
it be

Below are all the present subjunctive forms of the verb “to make.”

I make	you make
he make	we make
she make	they make
it make

The “present subjunctive” plays a relatively small, but nonetheless important, role in modern English.  Certain verbs, when followed by a clause beginning with “that,” require a subjunctive form of the verb in the following clause. For example, the verbs “request,” suggest,” “advise,” and “insist” are followed by a clause in the subjunctive mood.**

The hotel requests that each guest sign the register upon check-in.

The doctor suggested that she take up yoga.

The lawyer advised that he be patient and not do anything rash.

The customer insisted that she receive a full refund.

All the examples of the subjunctive above are shown with a third person singular subject.  This is simply to make it more obvious that the form of the verb is subjunctive rather than indicative. Most indicative and subjunctive forms look identical.

Other uses of the present subjunctive are extremely limited in modern English. Certain adjectives followed by a “that” clause take the subjunctive, as in “It’s important/necessary/mandatory that he follow these instructions exactly.” And certain constructions such as “in order that” and “lest” are also followed by verbs in the subjunctive (e.g., “She left two hours early lest she miss her train.”)  Certain set phrases such as “God save the Queen,” and “God bless you” also contain present subjunctive forms.

The “past subjunctive” is somewhat more active in that it is the form that is used in “if” and “wish that” clauses when describing something contrary to fact or considered impossible or highly improbable. Past subjunctive forms look identical to indicative past tense forms.  However, the subjunctive form for the verb “be” is “were” for all subjects.

If I were you, I’d sell that car while it still has some value.

He wishes he were here with us now.

If she were the child’s mother, she would have acted differently.

If I went to that school, I think I’d be happier than I am here.

I wish I had some money to help you with, but I really can’t spare any.

Although the term “past subjunctive” is used to describe these verb forms, the meaning conveyed is not one of past time.  When it’s necessary to indicate past time, forms that look like the indicative past perfect are used.

If I had been there last night, I would have tried to help.  (But I wasn’t there.)

If he had seen the deer, he would have braked earlier.    (But he didn’t see it.)

If they had been here yesterday, they would have gotten all the instructions. (But they weren’t here.)

I wish that I had gone to see a doctor sooner than I did. I might have avoided this surgery.

He wishes he hadn’t acted so hastily. He strongly regrets what he did now.

*The conditional mood is created by the use of “would” or other modal auxiliary preceding the verb–the verb itself does not have a special form to show conditional. A typical conditional sentence is in the form of “If I were you, I would tell him the truth.”  The interrogative mood is typically created by subject-verb inversion (“Are you ready?”)  or by the employment of an auxilary verb before the subject (“Do you think so?”).

**The requirement for the present subjunctive after certain verbs following a “that“ clause is felt more strongly in American English than in British English. Speakers of British English often insert “should” before some of these verbs or may avoid these constructions altogether when possible.  Instead of “He advised that she be on time,” a British speaker might say “He advised that she should be on time” or “He advised her to be on time.”  American speakers may be inclined to avoid the subjunctive as well if there is a grammatically correct alternative.  The subjunctive can feel somewhat formal.

In English, the shortest “full sentence” we can make is made up of 1) a subject and 2) a verb that shows past or non-past time (or a modal auxiliary verb, such as “can,” “will,” “should,” or “might”). Every sentence that is technically called a “sentence” consists of, at least, these two things.

SUBJECT	VERB
She	paints.
We	won.

A subject in a sentence can consist of just one word, or it can consist of many words.  The crucial factor is that it functions as a noun.  It may be a simple noun (like “milk”), a subject pronoun (such as “I,” “we,” “he,” “she,” or “you”), a gerund (like “sleeping” or “thinking”) a phrase, or anything else that can function as a noun.  That is, it is a person or a thing (or many persons or many things).  Of equal importance is that the subject of a sentence is generally the person or thing that does the action of the verb or is described by the action, thing, quality, or condition expressed by the verb part of the sentence.

SUBJECT	VERB
Lions	hunt.
He	forgets	a lot.
The audience	laughed.
The people across the street	moved.
What	happened?
My father	is	a mechanic.
They	are	happy.
The cat that was up in the tree	came	down finally

Another thing that defines a subject is that it “governs” its verb.  That is, the verb takes a particular form depending on what “person” the subject is. For example, the verb “work” in a sentence in the present tense will be “work” if the subject is “we,” “I,” “you,” or “they” (or an equivalent of one of these), but it will be “works” if the subject is “he,” “she,” or “it.” In the case of the verb “be,” the form of the verb varies to a greater extent. “Be” has three forms in the present tense–the word “am” for the subject “I,” the word “is” for the subjects “she,” “he,” or “it,” and the word “are” for the subjects “we,” “they,” and “you.” “Be” also has two different forms in the past tense, “was” and “were,” which vary according to their subject.

The word “sentence” is defined in various ways, but the way the word is generally used in traditional grammar has one specific meaning:  A sentence is a statement or question that consists, at least, of (1) a subject and (2) an accompanying verb that reflects time (past or non-past) or contains a modal auxiliary (e.g., “must,” “can,” “will,” etc.)*  Therefore, single words are not sentences, and phrases like “Not yet,” “In the kitchen,“ “Beautiful day!” and “To be or not to be” are not “sentences.”

Things like “Oh, no!” “Congratulations!”  and “Huh?” are certainly complete and important things to say as well, but they are not considered “sentences” as far as English grammar is concerned. That does not mean that there is anything wrong with them.  It’s just that they cannot be defined as “sentences.” Moreover, something like “my leaving on Friday” is not a sentence because, even though there is an action, “leaving,” and somebody doing that action (me), the verb form “leaving” does not show whether it refers to past or non-past time.  (“Friday” could refer either to last Friday or next Friday or some other Friday in the past or future.) “Leaving” is a timeless form, and a “sentence,” according to notions of grammar, must show past or non-past time in the verb (or contain a modal auxiliary). In addition, the word “my” in “my leaving on Friday” is a possessive adjective rather than a noun, so it can’t be considered a subject of a sentence. (Actually, this whole phrase “my leaving on Friday” could be the subject of a sentence because it is acting as a noun.)

A subject of a sentence must be a noun, or something that functions like a noun. For example, it may be a subject pronoun (such as “we,” “I,” “he,” “she”), a gerund, or a phrase that functions as a noun. Therefore, a string of words like “She walked” is a full sentence, but “her walking” is not. Similarly, “He helped” is a full sentence, but “him helping” is not.

It’s important to note that a subject of a sentence can be quite long. A subject can consist of one word or it can consist, for example, of one noun and many adjectives and adjectival clauses and phrases.  For example, the phrase “That friendly old guy at the party that asked me that question about my mother” can function as the subject of a sentence.  It is not in itself a sentence even though it is long and it has a verb, “asked,” which goes with “guy.”  It is not a sentence because the phrase “that asked me a question about my mother” is working as an adjective simply to describe which “guy” is being talked about.   The verb “asked” is a subordinate verb, not a main verb (a required verb to make a sentence) because it is part of this adjectival clause.  A full sentence would have to tell us what this friendly old guy at the party who asked me a question about my mother actually did.

NOT A FULL SENTENCE	FULL GRAMMATICAL SENTENCE
Passed!	I passed!
Not yet.	She has not yet made her decision.
In the kitchen.	They are talking in the kitchen.
You!	You should!
Beautiful day!	It is a beautiful day!
Walking.	Walking is their usual way of getting to school.
My leaving on Friday	My leaving on Friday will upset my mother.
The cat that was sitting by the window	The cat that was sitting by the window yawned.

*Imperative sentences, such as “Stay there!” “Put the keys on the table,” are considered complete grammatical sentences even though their intended subject, “you,” is not expressed.

A predicate is a major element of a sentence.  Simply defined, it is the verb part of the sentence.  It is the part of a sentence that contains the verb and elements of the sentence attached to the verb. The term “predicate” stands in contrast to the term “subject.”  The following sentences are broken up into their subjects and predicates.

SUBJECT	PREDICATE
He	left.
He	left two hours ago.
I	bought some coffee.
The people next door	invited us to their party.
Swimming	is not my favorite type of exercise.
The woman who found my ring	had tried to call me earlier.

A “phrase,” in one sense of the term as it is used in grammar, is a group of words that forms part of a sentence but does not contain a subject and verb that operate together grammatically. In other words, “in Chicago” is a phrase, but “They live in Chicago” is not a phrase. (The larger group of words containing the subject “they” and the verb “live” is a clause. It is also a grammatical sentence in itself.)

Here are some more examples of this type of phrase. Notice that there is a grammatical ordering of the words but no subject-plus-verb combinations.

the large apartment upstairs

in the New Year

his new girlfriend

sleeping on the couch

my apologizing to her

after the movie

We often use the word “phrase” in connection with the notion of “prepositional phrase.” Prepositional phrases are a combination of a preposition followed by a noun, pronoun, or group of words functioning together as a noun; for example, phrases like “in the park,” “after midnight,” “for me and you,” “beyond that tree over there” are all prepositional phrases.

In a different sense of the term “phrase” in grammar, a phrase is seen as a main constituent, or primary building block, of a sentence, such as a “noun phrase” or a “verb phrase.”  The sentence “The man who bought the ring returned it the next day” is made up of the noun phrase “The man who bought the ring” and the verb phrase “returned it the next day.”  In this sense of the term “phrase,” it is possible for there to be one-word phrases.  For example, the word “she” in the sentence “She is sleeping” is a noun phrase just in itself.  The word “forgot” in the sentence “I forgot” is the entire verb phrase in that sentence. Every English full sentence consists of at least a noun phrase and a verb phrase, which is sometimes represented as

S (sentence)=NP + VP.

The term “possessive” in grammar often refers to actual possession as we normally think of it.  When we talk about “Sam’s phone,” we are using a possessive indicator (‘s) to say that we are talking about a phone that is possessed by Sam.  An “s” preceded by an apostrophe (‘) is the device we use to make ordinary nouns possessive in English.  However, once we make a noun possessive and place it in front of another noun, it stops being a noun and becomes an adjective. In this case, the possessive form “Sam’s” describes, or “modifies,” the noun “phone.” It is a possessive adjective.

Grammar somewhat stretches the idea of possession, however.  First of all, it allows things to possess other things—for example, the city’s shopping district, the atom’s nucleus, the film’s director.  It also allows relationships that are not exactly possessive in nature:  the woman’s request, the room’s temperature, the boss’s retirement, the country’s largest city. So sometimes the meaning of the possessive form is not strictly possessive but describes a relationship of one thing being in close association with another thing–one thing may be a part of another thing, for example, or may be controlled by, created by, or located in another thing.

Some very important words in English are the possessive adjectives that are related to personal pronouns.  These are the words “my,” “his,” “her,” “their,” “your,” “our,” “its,” and “whose.”  These words, of course, are used to indicate possession in both the usual and “stretched” senses of the word, as in “my jacket,” “my job,” “my idea,” “my misunderstanding.”

Another function that possessive adjectives have is to show the agent (the doer) of the action described by a gerund—a verb in its “-ing” form functioning as a noun. So, for example, in the sentence “I don’t like his coming home so late,” the doer of “coming home so late” is a certain male person, and his action of coming home so late is something that the speaker does not like.

In sentences similar to the example above, it is quite common for speakers to use object pronouns (“me,” “him,” “her,” etc.) or ordinary nouns instead of possessives:  Instead of saying “I don’t like his coming home so late,” many people would say “I don’t like him coming home so late.”  Instead of saying “They anticipated the doctor’s saying that,” many people would say “They anticipated the doctor saying that.”  Their intended meaning is most likely the same as if they used the possessive form in these instances.

Strict prescriptive grammarians might insist that because the forms “coming” and “saying” in the above sentences are functioning as nouns (verbal nouns), they must be preceded by an adjective, and therefore it is an error to say “I don’t like him coming home so late.”  From this point of view, “him” is simply wrong and only “his” would be correct.  Although there is good logic in this, use of the object pronoun may be surpassing the use of the possessive form in such sentences.

One reason that people have a strong tendency to use object pronouns and regular nouns rather than possessive forms in these types of constructions is that there is a similar construction in which the object form (e.g., “him”) is the correct and ordinary form preceding a verb with “-ing.”  This is when it is truly the sole object of the verb and this object just happens to be doing something that the speaker wants to mention.  For example, the sentence “I saw him going into the house” is basically the equivalent of saying “I saw him as he was going into the house” or “I saw him, and he was going into the house.”  The sentence might answer the question “What was he doing when you saw him?”

It is also possible and correct to say “I saw his going into the house” using a possessive form, but it wouldn’t be used to answer the question “What was he doing when you saw him?” This sentence answers the question “What did you see?” and the answer (the complete direct object) is “his going into the house.” It is the equivalent of “I saw the going into the house by him” or “I saw his act of going into the house.” Technically, the “-ing” form following the object pronoun is a present participle, and the “-ing” form following a possessive adjective is a gerund (a verbal noun).

The past participle is a verb part. The words “done,” “gone,” “lost,” and “forgotten” are examples of past participles. The past participle is a form that a main verb can take when it is used along with an auxiliary verb (e.g., “have gone,” “was forgotten”) to convey certain types of grammatical meaning. It generally looks exactly like the past tense form of a verb–the forms “walked,” “asked,” “begged,” for example, could be either past participles or simple past tense forms–but some verbs, particularly some very common verbs, have distinctive past participle forms. The words “been,” “broken,” “eaten,” “sewn,” and “sung” are some of these unique past participles.

The past participle is often seen in combination with the auxiliary verb “have” in what are called perfect forms.

I have been to Florida twice.

The thief had broken in through the window, and now he was upstairs.

The past participle is also used in the passive construction (wherein a grammatical object of a sentence becomes the grammatical subject).

All the donuts were eaten by the time I got back.

The national anthem is sung before every professional baseball game.

She was given a ring by her parents for her birthday.

The past participle is also used with certain verbs in special constructions such as “have something done” and “get something done” that refer to something being acted on as a result of someone’s request, wish, or demand.

They had their house painted last summer.

It’s hard to get any work done with all this noise.

She decided to have her hair colored.

Past participles are often used as adjectives or eventually become classified as adjectives in their own right (as well as continuing to be used as past participle forms of verbs).

The broken lamp was still on the floor.

The rotten vegetables began to smell.

All the work is finished now.

I was completely exhausted at the end of the race.

The word “object” in grammar refers to one of the important elements that can make up a sentence (or clause).  The simplest type of sentence contains only a subject and a verb–for example, “She left.”  The subject of this simple sentence is “she,” and the verb is “left.”  But many sentences contain an additional, grammatically important element, which is an object, as in the sentence “She left her umbrella.”  Moreover, some sentences contain two objects, as in the sentence “She left her son her valuable paintings.”

Below are examples of sentences that contain grammatical “objects.”

I bought a book.

I bought my friend a book.

We saw that movie you were telling us about.

Dad made us some sandwiches.

There are two types of objects that can directly follow a verb in a sentence.  One is the “direct object” and the other is the “indirect object.” In the sentences above, the words in italics are indirect objects.  The second object in each of these sentences with two objects is the direct object.  Both types of objects are composed of nouns, or words or phrases that can function as nouns.

As we have seen, sentences can contain both types of objects at the same time, as in the sentence “She’s reading the child (1) a story (2).”  In this sentence, the direct object is “a story,” and the indirect object is “the child.”  In addition, the meaning of the indirect object typically includes the idea of “to” or “for” so that instead of saying “She’s reading the child a story,” the same basic meaning can be conveyed by saying “She’s reading a story to the child.”  (Please see note below marked with asterisk as well as INDIRECT OBJECT for further discussion.)

If there is only one object in a sentence, it is understood as the direct object. Therefore, if we removed the words “a story” in the sentence “She’s reading the child a story,” we are left with the fairly strange “She’s reading the child,” wherein the child becomes the thing that is being read.  If there is an indirect object in a sentence (and it is not paraphrased with a prepositional phrase), it always occurs as the first object after the verb. Therefore, a sentence like *“He bought gifts me” is either wrong or very hard to interpret–someone is buying a person for gifts??   But, if we say “He bought me gifts,” we understand that gifts are the things that were bought, and that he bought the gifts for me.

For further explanation of these terms, see DIRECT OBJECT and INDIRECT OBJECT in this glossary.  In general, if someone uses just the word “object” in reference to English grammar, it is the “direct object” that is usually meant.  The term “object” is also sometimes used to refer to a noun or noun equivalent that follows a preposition to form a prepositional phrase (e.g, “The cow jumped over the moon.”)  This type of object is called an “object of a preposition.”

*The above discussion concerning the order of objects in a sentence refers to the order in “active” sentences. In active sentences, English uses the order SUBJECT+ VERB +INDIRECT OBJECT + DIRECT OBJECT, as in “The college sent each student a letter.”   In associated “passive” sentences, either one of the objects can become the grammatical SUBJECT of the sentence, as in “Each student was sent a letter by the college” or “A letter was sent to each student by the college.”