Reported Proposals In Subjunctive Mode

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 525):

In American English in particular, reported proposals are often in the ‘subjunctive’ (where the third person singular is the base form of the verb); for example:

||| The negotiations were suspended in January || when Syria insisted || Israel commit to returning to prewar 1967 borders. ||| 

||| Did they suggest || the attorney general investigate? ||| 

||| When Evans returned to Sydney with glowing reports of this fertile land [[he’d found]], || the Governor ordered || that a road be built. ||| 

||| Perhaps it was history that ordained || that it be here, at the Cape of Good Hope [[that we should lay the foundation stone of our new nation]]. |||

Subjunctive Mode

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 143n):

Note that the system of MOOD is a system of the clause, not of the verbal group or of the verb. Many languages also have an interpersonal system of the verb(al group) that has been referred to as ‘mood’: it involves interpersonal contrasts such as indicative/subjunctive, indicative/subjunctive/optative. To distinguish these verbal contrasts from the clausal system of MOOD, we can refer to them as contrasts in mode. The subjunctive mode tends to be restricted to the environment of bound clauses — in particular, reported clauses and conditional clauses having the sense of irrealis. In Modern English, the subjunctive mode of the verb is marginal, although there is some dialectal variation.