Eighteenth-Century German Grammars and the Subjunctive Mood

Abstract

The inflectional subjunctive in German, just like in English, is claimed to have been on the decline in the eighteenth century (see von Polenz, 1994, pp. 261–263). The functions of the synthetic subjunctive form were taken over by modal auxiliary forms, the periphrastic form würde and modal particles. The subjunctive forms in German are usually divided into two groups, namely, subjunctive I and subjunctive II. Present subjunctive (es gebe), perfect subjunctive (es habe gegeben) and future subjunctive (es werde geben) belong to the group subjunctive I, whereas past subjunctive (es gäbe), pluperfect subjunctive (es hätte gegeben) and the conditional (es würde geben) are part of the group subjunctive II (Durrell, 2002, p. 108). The analytic conditional form würde is nowadays rather frequently found in place of the synthetic past subjunctive¹ — this is not only the case in colloquial spoken German but also in written German, which is objected to by language purists (see Durrell, 2002, p. 339). In this chapter, I will be concerned with the description of the subjunctive (usually referred to as ‘Konjunktiv’ in German literature) in selected eighteenth-century grammar books, in order to find out whether grammarians commented on the decline of the form and whether they tried to prevent the language from changing.