(very quick) question about subjunctive

[Peter En]

Hi,

I'm trying to master the subjunctive and i've been following this site:

http://www.french-linguistics.co.uk/grammar/subjunctive_when_1.shtml

 

for help- and it states that if an action can be summarised by say, "cette action" or "cette situation" and also proposes an imagined situation, then it can be used with the subjunctive.

 

Taking in mind that, if I wanted to say something like

"he asserts that one should respect differences"

would it be

Il affirme cette action

-> Il affirme qu'on doive respecter les differences"

I had summarised that "cette action" is the act of respecting differences, and furthermore, as it's imagined situation that isn't actually happening at the moment that he's saying it, it would merit the subjunctive

 

I just wanted to make sure- I sort of got the impression before hand that the subjunctive was rarely used- but I feel from all the situations presented that I can basically use the subjunctive for almost anything.

[Neil Coffey]

The rule of thumb of the subjunctive being used to use a verb phrase where you'd normally expect a noun phrase (which is essentially what you're doing when you look for places where you could use a phrase such as "cette situation") applies to the specific place of it being a non-assertion.

But with verbs like "dire", "affirmer", "déclarer", "expliquer"... where you're to all intends and purposes reporting indirect speech, you would practically always use the indicative. (There are a few exceptions where the main verb is negative, though that use is not so common nowadays.)

A clue that might help you is that these verbs of 'declaration' that generally take the indicative are generally speaking verbs where you can "switch the sentence round". So for example:

"David explained that..." > "..., David explained."

"The Prime Minister confirmed that..." > "..., the Prime Minister confirmed."

As a rough rule of thumb, verbs where you can do this "switching round" will tend to take the indicative. Cases where you can't do the switching round will tend to take the subjunctive. So contrast with:

"The boss was angry that we finished so late." > "We finished so late, the boss was angry."

"The newspaper denies that the photographs are fake." > "The photographs are fake, the newspaper denies."

"He suggested we come round at 7 o'clock." > "We come round at seven o'clock, he suggested."

This inability to "switch the sentence round" is an indication that the corresponding sentence in French is likely to use a subjunctive. It is only a rough rule of thumb, though! And of course, the subjunctive is used in lots of cases where you don't have "X verb that Y".

[Peter En]

Thanks Neil!

 

I have another question though- if we were to use the indicative in say, a situation where the subjunctive may have been required (i'm not talking about obvious cases such as Il faut que... etc), would it be considered as a big mistake- or something not so grave?

[Neil Coffey]

Hi Peter,

This would really depend on the situation, I think. Obviously as you say, there cases like "Il faut que..." where pretty much any 7-year-old (French) child would use the subjunctive form, so to many speakers it would sound overtly "wrong" or "abnormally illiterate" not to.

Other cases would vary from "sounding a little odd or confusing" on one end of the spectrum to nobody even noticing or thinking you "should" have used the subjunctive on the other.

As an example of the first category, I were to say:

*Il est peu probable que tu viendras.

(Many/all?) French speakers would be expecting one of the following two sentences:

Il est peu probable que tu viennes.

Il est probable que viendras.

so in effect by not using the subjunctive, you have "mixed up" two possible sentences and the listener may have difficulty understanding which you intended.

With cases like Je suis content que..., Il est heureux que..., Je ne pense pas que... --and indeed even with some uses of bien que and quoique -- it's true that in these cases, the subjunctive is in effect a "learned nicety of educated French", but in reality many speakers would use the indicative here. So it wouldn't be a terrible blunder unknown to French ears if you used the indicative here and in some cases would even probably sound more natural. But it's probably fair to say that you would be diverging from "standard, learned French" and most speakers educated to (say) baccalaureate level would probably agree that in writing they'd use the subjunctive.

Then right at the end of the spectrum, you have cases where even highly educated speakers would disagree about which to use (e.g. (s')assurer que... is probably in this category).

(Interestingly, this is one key area where the analogy with the English "switching the sentence round" rule of thumb breaks down -- in English, the judgements about whether or not the sentence can be switched round probably don't depend on level of education but are simply natural features of the language. In fairness, the rule of thumb was first pointed out for Spanish, where it actually works a bit more consistently.)