Linguistics

Philosophy

Computer science

Natural language processing

Inference

Artificial intelligence

Alternation (linguistics)

Corpora

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.

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