Subjunctive mood

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There are many controversial and not thoroughly investigated points in the English grammar. Nevertheless, in my opinion one of the most difficult and not clear both from the point of view of its definition and description and from the point of view of its practical implementation in speech is the subject of the Subjunctive Mood. Even the name of this grammatical category seems ambiguous in term of its being approached and characterized by different outstanding linguists in our country and abroad. W. Somerset Maugham said that “The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible”. An alternative view is that the subjunctive mood remains an ordinary working feature of English grammar, but that it is called moribund because it is often indistinguishable from the ordinary present indicative. The whole system of the English subjunctive mood is far from stabilised, it is just in the making, and all that we can say about the analysed spective forms in this connection is that they tend to quickly develop into rigidly “formalised” features of morphology.