Subjunctive Clauses Clause Samples
A subjunctive clause is a grammatical construction used to express hypothetical, desired, or non-factual situations within a contract or legal document. In practice, these clauses often appear when outlining conditions that must be met for certain actions to occur, such as stipulating what would happen if a party were to breach an agreement or if a specific event were to take place. The core function of subjunctive clauses is to clearly articulate potential scenarios and their consequences, thereby reducing ambiguity and ensuring all parties understand the implications of various possible outcomes.
Subjunctive Clauses the probehood of lower functional heads Next we add to the picture data from agreement in what we refer to as subjunctive clauses. Although there is no special subjunctive morpheme in Ibibio, the clauses in question function as the complements of verbs like yem ‘want’ and have subjects that are disjoint from the subject of the matrix clause (rather than controlled PRO subjects, as in (42c)). Some examples are:
▇. ▇▇▇▇ a-▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇ a-si-nam. ▇▇▇▇ 3sS-want Emem 3sS-IMPF-do ‘▇▇▇▇ wants Emem to be doing it.’
▇. ▇▇▇▇ a-yem (ɲɲin) i-di. ▇▇▇▇ 3sS-want we 1pS-come ‘▇▇▇▇ wants us to come.’
c. Ami n-yem afɨt owo e-kpa. I 1sS-want all person 3pS-die ‘I want everyone to die.’ We call these subjunctive clauses by comparison with Romance languages, in which the complement clause in sentences like these would be in the subjunctive mood. The first structural property of subjunctive clauses to notice is that the verb displays normal phi-feature agreement with the subject, as is already evident in (48). In this respect, these clauses are like finite indicative clauses in Ibibio, rather than like infinitival clauses. The second notable property of these clauses is that they have no overt Tense head. The embedded verbs in (48) consist of a verb root, an agreement prefix, and in one case an aspect head ((48a)), but there is no visible tense morpheme. The examples in (49) show that it is impossible to have an overt T morpheme in the complement of a verb like ‘want’.
Subjunctive Clauses. In the preceding sections I have argued that the abstract syntactic property of finiteness encodes the logophoric anchoring of a clause. Finite clauses are anchored to the external logophoric centre, i.e. the external Speech event (S), whereas non-finite clauses are anchored to an internal logophoric centre.