The Subjunctive

[Sandy Marina]

Salut!!

HELP! I'm having some serious issues with the Subjunctive tense........is there an easy way than to seive through all the rules and regs?

Sandy

[Neil Coffey]

OK, in essence the subjunctive is a verb form that indicates a "non-assertion". So it's basically used for those cases where you don't actually say that something has happened/will happen, but you kind of "snapshot" a situation.

So it's like in English when you say "him arriving late", "for Ben to finish the job" etc. If I say:

"I'm really angry at him arriving late"

The sentence isn't really saying "He arrived late" -- it's really making a statement about your reaction to that event.

So it's generally these "snapshotting" phrases where languages with subjunctive forms (including French) tend to use them.

That said, there are, though, cases where you do just have to observe which verb form (indicative or subjunctive) speakers tend to use in particular cases. For example, you might expect the verb espérer ("to hope") to be the ideal candidate for introducing a "snapshot/imagined situation". But in practice many speakers use it with the indicative (and some prescriptivists actually think of it as a "mistake" to use the subjunctive in this case).

Antoher way of looking at things is that the subjunctive "turns a verb phrase into a noun". So often if you have a case where normally the grammar would require a noun (like "this situation", "those problems") but what you want to put is a verb phrase ("us being so late", "for them to have that problem"), there's a good chance that verb will end up in the subjunctive.

I'd say also have a look at the pages I put up on the French subjunctive and see if any of this makes sense.