'Perfect subjunctive'

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on July 29, 2009 at 5:42pm

There are various problems with saying that e.g. (que) je l'aie vendu "means" (that) I should/may have sold.

Remember that in languages that have them, subjunctive forms are essentially normal, boring, everyday verb forms just like any other verb form. It doesn't make sense to translate them using unnatural, convoluted phrases. In quite formal English, it's true that using should can occasionally have a function similar to subjunctive of many languages (e.g. "I'm outraged that he should have sold the car!"). But in reality, this is quite formal, unnatural English for many speakers. Translating it likes this gives the impression that the subjunctive is somehow a "formal", "special" verb form, when really, in languages that genuinely have subjunctive forms, they're normal, everyday vereb forms just like any other.

(There are a few corner cases where prescriptive grammars and those following them do consciously worry about whether to use indicative vs subjunctive, but this is true of other tenses generally, and in any case, these really are minor, corner cases-- 99% of the time, native French speakers instinctively choose between subjunctive and indicative, just as they choose, say, between imperfect and passé composé.)

So why not learn a single translation even if that single translation is something else? Well, really the argument applies to every tense. If you learn that je vois means "I see", then you have to be prepared to actually translate it with I can see, I'll see etc depending on the context. The "meaning" given to each tense in your verb book is just a guide. I think what the author wants to imply is that subjunctive forms in particular tend to have a wide variety of translations, so it doesn't make much sense to pick one of them out as "the" translation.

If you really want a rough general translation for the subjunctive, then the nearest general equivalent in English involves non-conjugated expressions such as for Peter to buy the car, Jane making dinner etc. If you read through my tutorial on What is the subjunctive, you'll see on the second page I've listed a few such expressions. You'll notice I have also listed some possibilities with English modals should, might (and in fact others would sometimes apply)-- sometimes these are appropriate translations, just not the only or necessarily most common.

But as a strategy, I would say you're better off just learning when the subjunctive is used, and then worry about the translation afterwards (which will vary widely from sentence to sentence), rather than trying to predict the use of the subjunctive based on the translation from English.

By the way, your dictionary definition is really an informal definition by example, and a bit woolly. You can't really use such a definition to predict when the subjunctive is going to be used, or expect the English translation of a given verb to my reflected by it!

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Permalink Reply by Pete Laubscher on July 29, 2009 at 10:09pm

Much obliged. I shall revert to your tutorial. Much food for thought here.

But why the conditional as well as the subjunctive mood?

Is 'Je finirais', 'IF I should finish'?, not merely 'I should finish'?

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on July 30, 2009 at 7:33am

The answer to your very last question-- and I think this may be where some of the confusion lies-- is neither.

Canonically, though with the caveats I've mentioned about pretending that any tense has a single translation, the conditional tense essentially translates "would", as in either future-in-the-past or 'potential' action. So je finirais would generally mean I would finish.

It's true that in fairly archaic English, it's possible to say e.g. I should like a cup of tea, which is why some grammar books sometimes associate should with the conditional. But I think this is just confusing, and for the sake of learning the basic use of the tenses, I'd ignore the association between should and the conditional.

In current French, the subjunctive and conditional forms serve largely different purposes, and rarely compete with one another. There are just occasional cases where they alternate, e.g. je cherche quelqu'un qui puisse/pourrait m'aider and, essentially in legalese, the past subjunctive (derived from the Latin pluperfect subjunctive, but now obsolete in French), can occasionally function as an "if" clause (fût-ce nécessaire means something like même s'il était nécessaire; le prix global, dépassât-il 100,000 euros...).

It's true that once upon a time, some uses of the subjunctive competed with the conditional, or indeed completely fulfilled roles that the conditional now has. Why the switch? Well, it's really hard to pinpoint a single cause for this or any language change-- languages are complex systems, and change as a system. Why should one language decide to express the idea of "would" with a separate word as in English, while others use a synthetic verb form as in Romance languages? Why should some languages use a subjunctive form, or even allow the subjunctive and word "would" to alternate (e.g. German)? There's a level on which "it's just arbitrary".

But, some factors to think about are:
- Latin had a fairly complex system of synthetic verb forms, including various subjunctive forms, but arguably they were breaking down at a fairly early stage; I'm not really familiar with all the data/arguments[*] that this is based on, but Holmes & Schutz, for example, suggest various Latin tenses (including the perfect and imperfect subjunctives) that in practice probably weren't actually used by a fairly early stage and were maintained artificially in writing
- the conditional tense in Romance languages appears to have developed on analogy with the future tense, which as you may know developed from the infinitive plus present tense of habere (so what is currently (je) chanterai in French, would originally have been something like cantare habeo); the conditional probably developed on analogy (cantare habebam > (je) chanterais)...
... so on the one hand, Latin had various subjunctives that could fulfil this purpose, but on the other, the rise of the conditional was in some sense a "natural development" given the emerging future tense.

[*] But one overall reason is that phonetic changes that were taking place blurred some of the distinctions between the various endings.

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Permalink Reply by Pete Laubscher on July 30, 2009 at 2:31pm

Thank you very much for the careful exposition. The use of Latin examples clarified my problem quite a bit.

A final comment:

Can one then say, e g, that to make sense of the term ‘Conditional’, if ‘should’ generally means (is best considered as) ‘would’, that Cantare habebam could be followed by si adeo ?

Otherwise what remains of the conditional in ‘Conditional Mood’? Does ‘if’ not have to appear somewhere, can one say even possibly as an enthymeme?

One suspects that it makes sense to say that grammarians (probably philologists) would not continue to describe the everyday use of a mood as conditional if it wasn’t.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on July 30, 2009 at 6:53pm

I think you worry too much about trying to ascribe a meaning to the term "conditional"!

Remember, tense names like "present", "imperfect", "conditional" etc are just arbitrary labels. You could equally call them "Tense A", "Tense B", "Tense C" or whatever. Labels like "conditional" are maybe intended to portrary a rough description of typical use of the tense in question, to make it easier to remember which form you're referring to. But they're not "intrinsically accurate" in any real sense. If you can't rationalise the name "conditional", I wouldn't worry about it too much. The important thing is that you understand when forms such as je finirais etc are used, and how they are generally interpreted.

In typical uses of "conditional" forms, the verb in the conditional is expressing an action this is conditional on some other action (either expressed or implied) being true. For example:

Si j'étais riche, je m'achèterais un nouvel ordinateur.

or for example:

À ta place, je m'achèterais un nouvel ordinateur.

here you could imagine à ta place as a paraphrase for si j'étais toi.

But in other cases, it's not clear what the if clause would be. In particular, the conditional functions (as indeed would ... in English) as a future-in-the-past:

Il m'avait dit qu'il viendrait.

And consider the conditional in Spanish, which often has the meaning "would have ..." when making a reflection about the past:

Serían las dos cuando...
It would have been two o'clock when...
(i.e. "I suppose it must have been two o'clock when..")

In this latter case, it's really not clear what the enthymeme would be...

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Permalink Reply by Pete Laubscher on July 30, 2009 at 11:39pm

Thank you so much for your patient explanation. It is greatly appreciated and a huge help. Things are much clearer now. Thnks again!

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