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When to use the subjunctive?

Test 1: postposition

We introduced the notion of assertive vs non-assertive verbs but now need a way to distinguish between them. The first test, due to Bolinger (1974)¹, is that assertive verbs can generally be postposed. That is, some of the sentences above can be re-cast so that the main verb is added as a kind of "throwaway phrase" at the end of the sentence. For example:

John is a liar, David says
The president is dead, El País reported yesterday
We have time, I think
It's appropriate to send a gift, we think
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Sentences like this would have the subordinate clause in the indicative in Spanish. (Remember, "indicative" is just a fancy way of saying "normal, non-subjunctive" form.) On the other hand, the re-cast versions of these sentences don't normally² work:

*we have time, Paul doubts
*he won't help, I'm shocked
*it's appropriate to send a gift, we scarcely think
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In these cases where the re-cast doesn't work, Spanish tends to use the subjunctive. So for example, in Paul doubts that we have time, the Spanish equivalent to have would be in the subjunctive. (The main verb— doubts— would be in the indicative.)

Verbs with double status

An interesting though predictable phenomenon occurs with certain verbs that can be assertive or not, depending on the intended meaning. Recall the following example:

I understand that you've been ill
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Now, this sentence can actually have two different meanings:

• it could mean something like "I've heard that you've been ill";
• it could mean something closer to "I sympathise with you because you've been ill".

Now let's consider that the first meaning is assertive, but the second is non-assertive. We would then expect that, if we re-cast the sentence, it would lose its non-assertive meaning, since only assertive verbs can be postposed. And indeed, this is what appears to happen. In the re-cast version of the sentence:

You've been ill, I understand.
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the interpretation would generally be "You've been ill, I hear" rather than "You've been ill, and I sympathise with you" ³. On this basis, we would predict the following about Spanish usage:

• the indicative is used for the "I hear" interpretation;
• the subjunctive is used for the "I sympathise" interpretation.

It turns out that these predictions are largely true. Other "double status" verbs that behave similarly include insist. Problems with the postposition test

The postposition test works reasonably well in most cases. However, it fails or doesn't work well in a few cases:

• it relies on the speaker accepting sentences in a "narrative style"— in other words, in performing the re-cast we could be turning a plain, ordinary sentence into one that sounds a little literary; some speakers may judge a impossible a sentence which is actually sometimes used in a literary style, and judgements about what is "possible but literary" may differ from speaker to speaker;
• it doesn't take account of occasional cases where acceptability of the subjuncitve in Spanish can depend on tense⁴.
• perhaps more seriously, it can make the wrong prediction for modal verbs like must, should.

The problem with modal verbs concerns English sentences such as:

"Daniel insisted we should finish"
"We should finish, Daniel insisted"
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As you can see, the re-cast works in English. But nonetheless Spanish often uses the subjunctive in such a case. The second test for using the subjunctive that we discuss in the next section can rescue some of these cases.

1. Bolinger, D. (1974), One subjunctive or two?, Hispania 57:462-472.
2. Occasionally, speakers do humoristically use utterances such as He's well-dressed, I don't think. But it seems clear in these cases that the speaker is deliberately constructing an "abnormal" sentence for humorous effect.
3. It can have the latter meaning if we break it into two sentences: You've been ill. I understand.
4. For most learners, this isn't such a big problem, but concerns sentences such as Bolinger's original parece que están listos, the indicative being correctly predicted on the grounds of They're ready, it seems. Furthermore, parece que estén listos is generally judged ungrammatical by native speakers. However, the postposition test doesn't predict the apparent grammaticality of the past subjunctive: parece que estuvieran listos.