The appropriate use of the subjunctive mode has always been one of the worries of our language, both for Italians and for Italian speakers. “If I knew it, I wouldn’t come: with this provocative title – writes the young Valentina Paganelli – Marco Mazzoleni became the standard-bearer of the linguistic thesis in 1992 about the groundlessness of a supposed crisis of the conjunctive mode in Italian, a theory now shared by the main linguists who have seriously dealt with the matter.
The belief that the subjunctive is the victim of a progressive decline, however, continues today – almost thirty years after that work – to be widespread and generalized. In particular, symptoms of alarmism are often connected to this belief: indicative-friendly young people are accused of ignorance and the use of the subjunctive is praised as the panacea for the linguistic-grammatical ills of our time “. Continue reading>