Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Chow]

I teach composition (University) and besides all of the standard writing lessons (paragraph types, organisation and planning, essays, etc) I try to mix in some grammar lessons to help students overcome some common mistakes. As I check their homework, I make notes of the most common errors and then address those errors in class.

I put together a prescriptive lesson for using the subjunctive mood and we spent three classes discussing and practicing it's use. However, when I was checking their homework I found some puzzling situations.

I gave them short questions -- "What would you do if . . . ? -- and had them write a paragraph-length response. One of the students and I have been working through her response and, ultimately, I got stuck.

First, her original topic sentence read: "If my grandmother cooked lunch for me, but it tasted horrible, I would tell her it is delicious."

Easy enough. I told her to check the verb tense of "is" and get back to me when she solved it. Her response was instinctively to use "was" and when I read the corrected sentence it seemed correct. However, every book I have, and every source I have seen online tells me that "were" is always the past subjunctive form of "be". A lot of sentences in the subjunctive seem awkward, but replacing "was" with "were" in this case seems doubly so: "I would tell her it were delicious."

I know that "was" is most common in conversation, and that in informal writing it is often accepted, but for the sake of providing my student with a clear answer, I need to dig deeper into this.

Any ideas?

[spyro25]

wouldnt it depend on whether the noun was plural or not? the 'it' in this case is the meal, which is singular, hence the past subjunctive 'was'.

if it was a meal, it would be was.
if it were a number of meals, it would be were

[sock]

[Hater Depot]

it was

they were

[Privateer]

[Novernae]

"If my grandmother cooked lunch for me, but it tasted horrible, I would tell her it is delicious."

The form is

If [subjunctive/past], then [would].
If she cooked, I would eat.
If she died, I would cry.

The second part of the main clause does not require a subjunctive, that occurs in the if clause.

Think of this:

If she cooked, I would tell her "It is delicious."

There is no effect on the speech, and there is also no effect when it becomes reported speech, which moves the tense back one level into the past, to 'I would tell her it was delicious.'

Leaving us with:

If she cooked, I would tell her it was delicious."

Sorry I can't be more accurate with the terminology, that flew out of my head after a year or so of teaching 'listening.'

[Woland]

Novernae has it exactly right.

The shift in tense in "It was delicious" is important in formal writing, but not so common elsewhere, especially in speech. This was one of Michael McCarthy's discoveries about spoken language when he examined his corpus off conversational speech - people (native speakers) do not follow the "rules" regarding tense shift in reported speech, but instead, commonly act as if they were quoting.

[Chow]

Thank you Novernae. Now that I look back at it, in light of your explanation, it makes perfect sense.

[Wangja]

[meangradin]

I thought the subjunctive verb can only be in simple form, as it does not have a past, present or future tense. Furthermore, the subjunctive verb is neither singular or plural.

Am I wrong?

[Novernae]