Mandative subjunctive versus should in world Englishes: a new take on an old alternation

Abstract

This study explores the alternation between the mandative subjunctive and its modal alternative with should across native and non-native Englishes. Methodologically, we try to improve on existing standards by investigating over 3,300 occurrences of the alternation from the Corpus of Web-based Global English and annotated for a range of linguistic factors analysed with a forest of conditional inference trees; also, we are exemplifying a new strategy for the use of random or conditional inference forests in corpus-based alternation studies. We obtain a forest with significant prediction accuracies and a good C-score and discuss the strongest predictors of the subjunctive versus should alternation across Englishes. Contrasting with existing research, our multi-factorial results: ( i) suggest that in British English the mandative subjunctive may not be dying out as much as we thought; and ( ii) individual suasive verbs influence speakers' use of the two variants more than their variety of English.