The Subjunctive Mood in Eighteenth-Century Germany and Austria: A Corpus Study

Abstract

In 1890/91, Dr H. von Dadelsen, a teacher from Guebwiller in Alsace complained in two issues of the Zeitschrift für den deutschen Unterricht about the increasing use of the würde-periphrasis of the German subjunctive II in place of the synthetic past subjunctive forms. He was particularly incensed about the use of the würde-periphrasis in the wrong context, that is, not simply in conditional sentences but also in main clauses, wishes and indirect speech. Von Dadelsen (1890) believed that the origin of this development lay in the widespread use of the periphrastic form in conditional clauses from where it had been adopted in other contexts in which the synthetic past subjunctive forms had originally been used. He made the following prediction:

Wenn das so weitergeht, so werden die klangvollen Formen des Konjunktivs wie gäbe, träte, grübe, flöge allmählich ganz verschwinden, und dann ist unsere Sprache auf dem Standpunkte der englischen angelangt, die nur noch unbedeutende Überreste dieser Präteritalformen besitzt und den Konjunktiv entweder umschreibt oder durch den Indikativ ersetzt.

(von Dadelsen, 1890, p. 159)

In this citation von Dadelsen points out the danger of the German subjunctive developing in a similar way to the English subjunctive, of which only remnants of preterite forms are found in the language.