The Survival of the Subjunctive in Australian English: Ossification, Indexicality and Stance

Research on the subjunctive in Australian English has typically relied on corpus interrogation to ascertain frequency of occurrence of the target forms across text types. Such work has been valuable in confirming trends in usage, such as the increasing use of the mandative subjunctive and the decline of the were subjunctive, but has yet to explore in detail motivations behind the continued survival of what had widely been described as a moribund variant. Based on syntactic evidence, we distinguish the plain form subjunctive, which includes the traditional mandative subjunctive, from the were subjunctive. Using existing corpus-based results as well as data from additional corpus searches, we suggest that there are two primary factors in the subjunctive's continued existence in Australian English; firstly, the presence of a growing set of ossifying subjunctive frames within which the subjunctive is marked, and secondly, the role of the subjunctive in indexing formal-prestigious-standard English style, with the were subjunctive indexing literariness and the plain form subjunctive indexing a stance of power and epistemic authority.