How conditional indicative sentences differ from subjunctive sentences

[Joe Carillo]

Question e-mailed by Edsel Ocson, who describes himself as an interested reader (April 12, 2014):

In your recent article about media people and the subjunctive mode (“Some recurrent misuses of the English subjunctive”), I found the following sentence: “It would really be a shame if an otherwise well-written reportage or well-argued commentary is needlessly undermined by faulty subjunctive construction.”

Don’t you think the word “is” in the above sentence should be changed to “were”?

My reply to Edsel Ocson:

No, the “is” in that sentence of mine shouldn’t be changed to “were” because it’s not a subjunctive sentence but a conditional sentence in the indicative mood. A conditional sentence is the type of sentence that conveys the idea that the action in the main clause can take place only if the condition in the subordinate clause—the “if”-clause—is fulfilled; its mood is indicative because it denotes acts and states in real-world situations, as in that sentence of mine that you are asking about. On the other hand, a subjunctive sentence is one that denotes acts or states that are contingent on possible outcomes of the speaker’s wish, desire, or doubt; it is in subjunctive sentences using an “if”-clause that the verb “be” exhibits maverick behavior, sticking to the past-tense subjunctive form “were” all throughout, regardless of the person and number of its subject.

This sentence of mine is in the indicative mood because, as I indicated earlier, it denotes an act and a state in a real-world situation: “It would really be a shame if an otherwise well-written reportage or well-argued commentary is needlessly undermined by faulty subjunctive construction.” It belongs to the type of conditional sentence called the zero conditional (certainty), which denotes a condition whose result is always true and always the same. In such conditional sentences, the “if” clause states the condition in the simple present tense, is followed by a comma, then is followed by the result clause also in the simple present tense, as in this basic example: “People get dehydrated if they don’t drink water” or, in the inverted form, “If people don’t drink water, they get dehydrated.” The sentence of mine that’s in question here has precisely the same conditional form: “It would really be a shame if an otherwise well-written reportage or well-argued commentary is needlessly undermined by faulty subjunctive construction” or, in the inverted form, “If an otherwise well-written reportage or well-argued commentary is needlessly undermined by faulty subjunctive construction, it would really be a shame.” (Here, as a nuance, I used “would” as a weaker form of the present-tense indicative “will.”)

Now I will explain why the word “is” in that sentence of mine can’t be changed to “were,” a change that conceivably would make it a subjunctive sentence. It’s because that sentence describes the outcome of an act or state in a real-world situation, making it indicative in the conditional sense. If we revise that sentence to describe the outcome of an unreal situation or idea contrary to fact, then it would become a subjunctive sentence that uses the subjunctive “were” instead of the indicative “is.” A usual way to do that is to express the condition as a wish: “Deeply embarrassed, the reporter wished that his otherwise well-written reportage or well-argued commentary were not needlessly undermined by faulty subjunctive construction.”

That sentence describing an outcome of an unreal situation or idea contrary to fact is just one of the many kinds of subjunctive sentences in which the verb “is” exhibits deviant behavior, consistently taking either the form of “were” or “be” regardless of the person and number of its subject. It will take quite long to discuss all those types of sentences now but I’ll be taking them up in detail in the subsequent installments of my column in today’s issue of The Manila Times, “Some recurrent misuses of the English subjunctive.” Of course, you have the option of going to Jose Carillo’s English Forum now to check out my previous postings on conditional sentences (start with “Do better than a calculated guess in handling conditional sentences”) and subjunctive sentences (start with “When are subjunctive sentences called for and how are they constructed?”). Doing that now will definitely give you a head start and an edge in attaining mastery of these rather confusing and tricky aspects of English grammar.

[Joe Carillo]

Follow-up question by Edsel Ocson (April 24, 2014):

Thank you for your explanation about indicative and subjunctive moods.

In the subject sentence, is the word “will” better or worse than “would,” the word you actually used?

Thanks again.

My reply to Edsel:

No, what’s involved in the choice between “will” and “would” in the following sentence of mine isn’t the matter of whether “will” is better or worse than “would,” or vice versa: “It would really be a shame if an otherwise well-written reportage or well-argued commentary is needlessly undermined by faulty subjunctive construction.” Both “will” and “would” are verbal auxiliaries that express a desire, wish, choice, or intent. The choice between them is simply a matter of degree or intensity or level of certainty, with “will” conventionally deemed to be a stronger and more certain than “would” in expressing that desire, wish, choice, or intent. 

If I were absolutely sure that the writer will always be put to shame if his otherwise well-written reportage or well-argued commentary is needlessly undermined by faulty subjunctive construction, I would have used the zero conditional form (certainty) for that sentence and used the verbal auxiliary “will” instead in the result clause: “It will really be a shame if an otherwise well-written reportage or well-argued commentary is needlessly undermined by faulty subjunctive construction.” But as things go in the real world, we couldn’t always be sure that the result will always be the same in such situations. The writer may not care that much for good grammar and  consider his faulty subjunctive construction a trifle or non-issue, in which case he wouldn’t feel any shame at all. It is with such a scenario in mind that I decided to use “would” instead of “will” for the result: “It would really be a shame if an otherwise well-written reportage or well-argued commentary is needlessly undermined by faulty subjunctive construction.” This allows for a little window of possibility that the writer may not feel any shame at all about his faulty subjunctive construction.

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Do better than a calculated guess in handling conditional sentences