Correct a sentence (subjunctive) 2

CGEL:

A significant weakness of traditional grammars of English is that they incorporate a number of categories that in fact have no place in a grammar of Present-day English, although they are perfectly valid for Latin (and in some cases older stages of English)

... Present-day English has no dative case. There is ... no basis at all for including dative among the inflectional categories of the English noun.

Hello Hela

I'm inclined to agree with CJ about your example 2:

'It's (high/about) time she WAS in bed'

seems the natural form, because you use this phrase when you have no doubt that the person should be in bed.

I agree too that the past tense here indicates: 'by this time, you should already be in bed'.

In the sentence "Give me a dollar", 'me' is an indirect object pronoun, as you can see if you rephrase it: 'give a dollar to me'. 'Dollar' is the object.

(I myself find it useful to think of the 'indirect object pronoun' as a 'dative'. Unfortunately, professional grammarians prescribe against this usage, and insist we say 'indirect object pronoun' instead. Pity. 15 extra letters to type.)

See you,
MrP

There is ... no basis at all for including dative among the inflectional categories of the English noun.

And there is likewise no basis for including nominative or accusative (or objective) among the inflectional categories of the English noun.

English nouns have no inflections whatever except for plurality and the apostophe-s.

The Cambridge reference is interested only in English from the inside, as it were. But if you widen the inquiry to include many languages you see that other languages do have dative as an inflectional category. When a native speaker of one of those languages wants to know how to say his dative construction in English, it doesn't help much to say English doesn't have one. It's pretty much a conversation stopper! It's just arguing terminology, and doesn't solve the student's problem. Taking a less rigid approach often eases communication and helps the student to acquire English faster by concentrating on the practical matters of speaking and writing English, not on the fine points of grammatical terminology.

I think we all tend to forget, because grammar and linguistics can be so fascinating in themselves, that we are not teaching grammar and linguistics as such, but only as a means to an end. I say if the means gets in the way of the end, toss it out.

CJ

Mr P wrote: The distinction is between functions, not forms. You want to write a sentence that expresses doubt, for example, or contingency. You decide to use the subjunctive mood. You look up the subjunctive, and find the correct form. As it happens, that form is sometimes the same as the indicative. No matter. All you want is the correct form. You don't care if it looks like something else – though that makes it easier to learn, of course. Cf. the present subjunctive in Italian, or Spanish: the forms are the same for the 1st and 3rd person singular. Cf. French, where the 3rd person plural forms of the present indicative and present subjunctive are the same. That doesn't mean French doesn't have a 3rd person plural present subjunctive.

Thank you for proving my point, Mr P, that equals in some situations in English. Yes, the indicative form CAN state the same thing as the subjunctive form. In fact, the subjunctive MOOD is expressed in most of English by forms that aren't GRAMMATICALLY subjunctive, for example,

If I went to Picadilly, I could ...

The deciding factor, as we can clearly see, is the presence of the past tense FORM, .

That's why it's allowable in modern English to use , [a past tense FORM] to state a counterfactual that means the same thing as does.