A Corpus-based Comparative Study On The Subjunctive In The 19^th Century And 20^th Century American Novels

American English gained its rather independent status and became mature between the 19^th and the 20^th century. It is unavoidably that such a change will be reflected in American literature. Thus there is great necessity to study the change in grammar between the American English in the 19^th century novels and the 20^th century American novels. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze one of the English grammatical items—the subjunctive in these two periods. It is intended to analyze the syntactic features and the distribution frequency of the subjunctive in the 19^th century American novels in comparison with the 20^th century American novels.With the help of FoxPro and SPSS, a series of computation and tests of the subjunctive are conducted and some pertinent data are obtained. The Chi-square tests are used to see if the difference in the distribution of the sub-categories between the two corpora is significant. It is found that the distribution of be-subjunctive and were-subjunctive in these two periods is significantly different and the usage of be-subjunctive is declining while the usgage of were-subjunctive remains the same. In addition, it is found that in many cases the indicative forms have taken the place of the subjunctive forms. This paper can provide some objective and scientific data for the future study and teaching of the subjunctive in novel language.