The mandative subjunctive in American English : a corpus-based study on the use of mandative constructions

Abstract

This corpus-based study is an attempt to reveal and explain the current diachronic developments of the mandative subjunctive in AmE and to understand the function that it performs in the utterance with respect to other mandative constructions. The author gives an account of the frequency and formality of the use of mandative constructions by ways of quantitative and qualitative analysis of the contexts. From a semantic perspective, the following aspects of the use of mandative constructions are discussed: interdependency between a suasive expression (trigger) and a mandative construction; semantic relationship between matrix and subordinate clauses in a mandative sentence.