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Formalities

Several grammatical features of English are mainly found in high formal speech and prose. For writers, mastering these can be a way of conveying a more formal tone and showing off one's rhetorical chops. There is nothing like a well-placed subjunctive, absolute construction, or parallel sentence adverbial to serve this purpose.

Modals and Mood. We use modal auxiliaries to express variations in meaning which older languages in our family expressed by inflections; the use of will to express the future is only one example. Our distant ancestors, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, seem to have enjoyed nothing more that inflecting their verbs and nouns for one shade of meaning or another. Verbs could be inflected for mood, indicating various degrees of factuality, probability, or desirability. Modern English has abandoned most such inflections. It has only three moods left: the indicative mood for expressing statements and questions, the imperative mood for expressing commands, and the subjunctive mood for expressing possibility. In practice, the indicative mood can be used to express everything and usually is. The imperative can be expressed using the base form of the verb (be, go) as in imperative sentences, but we often phrase our commands with polite circumlocutions, including the use of modals like must and should. Several modals, including should can be used to express various hypothetical or desirable situations.


Exercise 1: The Flexible Indicative

The following sentences are all in the indicative mood. Identify those which nevertheless express commands or hypotheticals of one sort or another:
1.01 You must go now, or my parents will catch us.
1.02 If they should come home before you go, all hell will break loose.
1.03 You can't leave your stuff on the floor like that.
1.04 Will you please pick it up?
1.05 Of course I wish you could stay.
1.06 By the way, I may have some news for you later this week.
1.07 I might be going to the doctor.
1.08 How would you feel about getting married?
1.09 I only meant we should be thinking about it.
1.10 You should hurry.

Like the imperative, the true modern present subjunctive is expressed through the base form of the verb. It is therefore distinctive only in the third person singular of most regular verbs. Sentences (1)-(3) below show that the subjunctive can be used in that clauses triggered by a verb (1), an adjective (2), or noun (3). Sentences (4) and (5) illustrate the subjunctive's use in certain old-fashioned formulae. Conditional clauses like those in sentences (6) and (7) can also use the subjunctive:

(1) They proposed that he go to China.
(2) It is advisable that he go to China.
(3) The general gave an order that the sentry fire without asking for a password.
(4) Heaven forbid that I should do this.
(5) Be that as it may, I am going.
(6) If that be the case, I am a dead man.
(7) We must take care lest we be seen as arrogant.

In modern English, the past subjunctive is pretty much confined to uses of were when one would otherwise use was. It is used in conditional or hypothetical clauses or in clauses which follow certain verbs:

(8) If I were a rich man, I wouldn't have to sing this song.
(9) He acted as though he were offended.
(10) I wish this class were over.


Exercise 2: Subjunctive or Not?

Identify the subjunctives or possible subjunctives in the following sentences. Watch out for modals and imperatives:
2.01 If I were king of the forest, not queen, not duke, not prince, my regal robes of the forest would be satin,not cotton, not chintz.
2.02 Be my love, for no one else can end this yearning.
2.03 They stopped talking lest she hear them.
2.04 She asked that I be the one to tell him.
2.05 If I might be so bold, you have been snoring.
2.06 I wish I were a pair of ragged claws.
2.07 It seems inevitable that he fail in this.
2.08 I told him that she would leave.
2.09 It is her plan that they wait till dawn.
2.10 Light my fire.

In Search of Absolutes. When talking about comparatives and superlatives, one sometimes hears the basic, ungraded form of the adjective referred to as its absolute form. In some traditional grammars, the term absolute clause or absolute phrase is used to describe certain sentence adverbials consisting of a noun followed by a modifying particple phrase (11) or adjective phrase (12):

(11) (a) He went home, his mission accomplished.
(b) Mission accomplished, he went home.
(12) (a) He went home, his eyes full of tears.
(b) Eyes full of tears, he went home.
In effect, the underlined expressions in (11) are just participial phrases with noun subjects supplied, while those in (12) are noun phrases with adjective modifiers following. What links them is that both can be turned into independent clauses by adding a tensed be verb in front of the modifier. As separate clauses, they would need the determiner his to show whose eyes or whose mission was involved. The absolute constructions in (11) and (12) stand as more elegant ways of joining clauses that we might otherwise link using subordinate clauses or prepositional phrases:
(13)(a) He went home, since his mission was accomplished.
(b) With his mission accomplished, he went home.
(14)(a) HIs eyes were full of tears, so he went home.
(b) He went home with his eyes full of tears.
When the participle phrase includes being or having or having been, these can often be deleted as well--in the case of being, at least, they almost always should be. This is the kind of stylistic point that crops up on sentence correction exercises on the GMAT and similar tests. Notice that the omitted matter adds nothing to our sample sentence:
(13) He went home, his mission (having been) accomplished.
(14) His eyes (being) full of tears, he went home.
Far from sounding elegant, sentences with an unnecessary being sound awkward and suggest a bad writer trying to sound like their betters. Such usages are not uncommon in academic and bureaucratic prose.

An even more formal tone can be achieved by using pairs or series of such constructions. The pairs should usually be joined by coordinating conjunctions, while series can be separated only by commas.

(15) He went home, his mission accomplished but his eyes full of tears.
(16) The wine poured, the dinner cooked, the table laid, we awaited our dinner guests.

Parallel Series. At the beginning or end of a sentence, any series of parallel phrases of any sort can be a useful rhetorical device. Here, for example, is Winston Churchill, out of office and denouncing the weakness of the government in power at the time:
Folk song lovers will recall the stirring verses of "The Use Parallel Construction for the Items in a Series Talking Blues," a song recorded by Alan Lomax at a camp of itinerant composition professors:
Put adjectives with adjectives and phrases phrase by phrase
Put infinitives together, make your verbals all the same
Keep it clear and easy, treat your readers like you dearies
Use parallel construction for the items in a series
. . . Just like Churchill
. . . And your professor
. . . And all them other great writers

(17) So they go on in strange paradox,
decided only to be undecided,
resolved to be irresolute,
adamant for drift,
solid for fluidity,
all-powerful to be impotent.

When series of this sort serve as sentence openers, delaying the main clause or its completion until the end of the sentence, we have the periodic sentence, beloved of orators since the days of Demosthenes and Cicero, who pioneered its use in Latin rhetoric. Sentence (16) above was a periodic sentence. Here's a better example from Abraham Lincoln:

(18) With malice toward none,
with charity for all,
with firmness in the right
as God gives us to see the right,
let us finish the work we are in,
to bind up the nation's wounds.
Q

How Much of This Will be on the Test?
This section has enlightened you on the mysteries of mood--indicative, imperative, subjunctive--in English verbs. You should be able to recognize an absolute clause and use it in your own writing. You should be able to recognize and correct errors in parallelism. You might even be asked to construct a periodic sentence of your very own.