The subjunctive alternation in Indian English

Abstract

The study at hand is an exploration of the alternation between the mandative subjunctive and its equivalent modal construction with the verb should in Indian English. The study complements the growing body of research on the morphosyntax of the variety and it enhances our understanding of the relatively under‐researched alternation. It adds a special focus on the short‐term diachronic development of the subjunctive alternation in Indian English by using data from the South Asian Varieties of English corpus and its 2020 update. The following research questions are being investigated in the paper: Which factors influence the alternation between subjunctive and should in Indian English; are there short‐term diachronic adjustments to the subjunctive paradigm? A multifactorial model was fitted on 508 extracted data points with the following predictors: lexical diversity, newspaper, word count, distance, gender, linking word, negation, subject number, subject person, time and trigger lemma. The results show minor diachronic adjustments and highlight well‐known predictors of the alternation like voice as important factors.