Abstract
The meaning of the French subjunctive and its relationship to the indicative have given rise to many proposals, those which addressed schematic descriptions, the breadth of specific uses, and, less frequently, the development over time. Harris (1978) provides a three-way typology of these proposals: (1) those that posit a range of meanings, (2) those suggesting one meaning overall, and (3) those which insist on its purely formal status or meaninglessness. The majority of the studies of all three sorts are based on Modern French data. Relatively few look at uses in Old French or, diachronically, an inventory of Latin, Old French, and Modern French triggers. There is, overall, little attention to broad questions of the evolution of meaning. The present chapter has as its goal to examine a number of proposals for the meaning(s) of the subjunctive, testing them on the data of Old French and theories of change.
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Notes
- 1.
As a result of this stipulation, I shall not discuss theories of the subjunctive coming from formal grammar (for example, Progovac 1993) based on syntactic criteria rather than meaning.
- 2.
Examples of contemporary subjunctive uses will be drawn from the secondary literature (here Soutet 2000) without further attribution unless such attribution is germane to the discussion.
- 3.
The following abbreviations are used in glossed texts: ACC  =  accusative, COND  =  conditional, f  =  feminine, IND  =  indicative, INF  =  infinitive, n  =  neuter, NOM  =  nominative, OBJ  =  oblique, m  =  masculine, pl  =  plural, sg  =  singular, SUB  =  subjunctive; with the exception of oblique (used in various traditions to designate globally all cases except the nominative), the other terms are standard grammatical nomenclature and have not been defined.
- 4.
Examples from Old French are, as here, largely from Foulet (1967), Martineau (1994), and Dreer (2007). I have provided the Old French source on the same line as the Old French with a word by word gloss below specifying gender, number, and case (NOM  =  nominative, OBL  =  oblique/non-nominative) for nominals and person, number, and subjunctive mood for verbs; if tense and other moods (indicative, imperative) are clear from the translation, they has not been otherwise specified.
- 5.
In the following examples, a. version is in Modern French and b. in Old French.
- 6.
Of course not all conjunctions with que take the subjunctive (pace Foulet 1967 discussed below); there has never been a time, for example, when parce que ‘because’ triggered anything but the indicative.
- 7.
By the seventeenth century, the use of the subjunctive was an archaism, although it appeared:
i.
Et une main si habile eût sauvé (SUB) l’Etat, si l’Etat eût pu (SUB) être sauvé.
 And such a capable hand could have saved the State, if the State could have been saved.
- 8.
The distinction is blurred in sentences expressing comparisons (cf. (14) and (15) above).
- 9.
Examples in this series are drawn from http://www.etudes-litteraires.com/forum/sujet-7843-2.html and ultimately from handbooks including Grevisse Le Bon Usage.
- 10.
One could make an argument that quelqu’un ‘someone’ is semantically ambiguous between a definite and indefinite reading in the same way that the indefinite article of (i): (i) I am looking for a Russian speaker can be read as referring to a uniquely identified Russian speaker or a true indefinite. In that case Conners and Harris can claim that even here the subjunctive is automatic in (28) and that the indicative/subjunctive choice in French is simply a morphological manifestation of a distinction which is (morpho)phonologically empty in English. I thank Carolyn Heycock for this comment.
- 11.
The ‘Universal’ in question states (in my paraphrase) that speakers of languages will tend, over time, to establish an isomorphism of form and meaning so that for every meaning there is one form and for every form there is one meaning.
- 12.
That is, ‘too uncertain to be situated on the level of reality without there being, however, a question of presenting it as hypothetical or unreal’.
- 13.
Nordahl (1969:18) provides a summary of several other attempts to define the subjunctive as a mood, with particular emphasis on French scholars, while Rothe (1967:3–28) does the same, although the first part of this overview discusses primarily German contributions to the question. Moignet (1959) is another excellent source of descriptions of previous work, as is Dreer (2007).
- 14.
- 15.
cf. Wright 1982 for extensive discussion of the problems in deciding what kind of Latin is the direct ancestor of Romance.
- 16.
We will return to this idea below in Sect. 18.5.
- 17.
It is certainly the case that the theories examined in this paper can be seen as being more or less satisfactory when they are compared one to another. A full critique of their usefulness to a description of Modern French is beyond the scope of this paper.
- 18.
The metaphors of cognitive grammar tend to be very physical, referring to linguistic entities as if they were arranged in space; I use them because they are the terms of my own work, but they are not necessary for the point being made here; leaving aside the underlying commitments of another theory, an OT tableau of better or worse candidates, as defined by shifting the ranking of constraints, might serve the same purpose.
Abbreviations
- ACC:
-
accusative,
- COND:
-
conditional,
- f:
-
feminine,
- IND:
-
indicative,
- INF:
-
infinitive,
- n:
-
neuter,
- NOM:
-
nominative,
- OBJ:
-
oblique,
- m:
-
masculine,
- pl:
-
plural,
- sg:
-
singular,
- SUB:
-
subjunctive
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Winters, M.E. (2013). Grammatical Meaning and the Old French Subjunctive. In: Arteaga, D. (eds) Research on Old French: The State of the Art. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 88. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4768-5_18
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