Il congiuntivo del verbo inglese: immaginazione o realtà?

This chapter deals with two main questions, strictly related to each other: on the one hand, the value of the subjunctive in English and the contexts where it occurs, with special regard for the present tense; on the other hand, its real frequency of use as part of the English verb system. The latter question is tackled also on the basis of data obtained by conducting a frequency analysis on the British National Corpus with the SARA software programme. The syntactic and, above all, morphological characteristics of the subjuntive mood are discussed and it is shown that traditionally in grammatical description - even in the most authoritative texts - the treatment of this verb mood has been controversial and uncertain, this uncertainty being a consequence of its precarious status in actual language use, a situation which has become ever more critical over time. In light of these elements and also considering the development of English in a historical perspective, a theory of the value of the subjunctive in contemporary English is put forth, on the basis of Guillaume’s psycho-mechanical model. In the conclusions, it is suggested that the typically controversial and uncertain character of the description of the English subjunctive is ultimately due to problems of grammatical categorization.