In Modals^x, Subjunctives^x

Hello MrP In the Japanese conditionals, we change the apodosis' expressions according to conditionals' reality. In the case the conditional is known to be rather unreal, we use an expression similar to English modal constructs in the apodosis, and when we judge neutrally about the possibility...

I am "Recusant." I'm new to this forum and I don't have password yet so I've signed in as a guest. Your comments on the subjunctive in English suggest that you are attempting to "shoe-horn" English into Latin grammatical concepts. I'm a bit of a linguistic iconoclast when it comes to this sort...

Hello I'm interested in this thread because I myself didn't get the usage and grammar of "would rather". I think "would rather" constructs are really peculiar as an English sentence. Let me show some example sentences for the discussion sake. (1) I would rather be lucky in business (than in...

Hello CJ Thanks for the reply. I googled the phrases "if I had/would have known that" and found about 10 % of people use "would have known" for "had known". What I'd like to know is the reason why those people are using "would have known" for "had known". The subjunctive past "had known" and...

Hello JTT Thank you for the kind reply and kind proposal. To compare with me, too bad a speaker of English, you are a great prescriptive grammarian in most respects. I understand what you are attacking is only about some subjunctive usage. Speaking the modals, I don't think there is any...

("would" does not form a subjunctive.) Thus, "She wouldn't let me do ..." is equivalent to "She refused to let me do ...". The Volkov: You confused me.. In *all class-books* the subjunctive mood means that speaker is considering an action as suppositional/possible/desirable... And would...

I'm supposing AmE and BrE developed somehow differently during 18th and 19th centuries (though they look now on a way to merge again due to intimate communication). One of the driving forces that made AmE different from BrE would be AmE was isolated from the development of BrE in England. For...

CJ Thank you a lot for the explanation. I down-loaded the two pdfs but I haven't read them yet. As I'm not familiar with linguistic terms, I'm afraid those articles would be quite hard to read through. But reading the article I found and your message, I noticed my first thought about...

Hello CJ Thank you for your compliment. But I'm really too ignorant about modals. It may be because I learned English to read and write engineering articles. In engineering documents they rarely use modals like 'would' or 'might'. By the way I am now reading an article titled as "Moods and...

Hello CJ Thank you for the reply. I feel I still didn't get the exact senses of will/would used in your speach. Every auxiliary verbs (modals) are diificult for me to grasp its sense. "Will/would" are above all the ones most difficult. You native speakers (and some ESL) could acquire those...