second slip - il n'y a aucun problème not aucune

@Wellid - I think you're probably new here, at least as a commenter. AnWulf and Brus have, admittedly, pretty idiosyncratic (and opposite) ideas about English, and I tend to disagree with just about everything Brus says about English, but they're both quite harmless and generally pretty civil. They really are part of the furniture round here, and Pain in the English wouldn't be what it is without them.

And if you think they monopolise the threads or produce a lot of side arguments, there's someone you obviously haven't met yet (and I'm not talking about me!).

The length of these threads seems to be more or less unlimited, so they're not taking argument space from anyone else.If you don't like their contributions, just skip them, as I do when AnWulf goes into his strange dialect (ideolect would perhaps be a more suitable word here, as I think he's the only person in the world who speaks it). Or when Brus starts teaching us English grammar :). But they both add a bit of colour to the discussions. And AnWulf can be quite knowledgeable sometimes :).

@EnglishTeacherTimothy - nearly full marks, except for the slip of the finger in the penultimate paragraph (second sentence), and is 'not' really a conjunction? Methinks not! Do people still talk about adjective clauses rather than relative clauses? But other than that, pretty comprehensive. Who do you teach? Native speakers or foreigners? You don't say in your profile. I'm sorry, this was your maiden speech; I should have left it uncommented.

A slip of the finger as usual - it's Varsovie, of course, not Varosovie.

@Brus - All three candidates for prime minister at the last election, in other words the leaders of the three main UK parties, David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg. I suppose that 'none of them had been prime minister' is your little joke because they said 'was' instead of 'were'.

I'm afraid I misunderstood your meaning of 'main verb', as this is an expression which is usually used to denote the lexical verb as opposed to the auxiliary. So in 'I don't want to swim' - the main verb (in the usual meaning of the term) is of course 'want', but not to differentiate it from 'to swim', which is its complement, but from its auxiliary 'don't'. In 'I don't swim' swim is the main verb. I suggest you google 'main verb' and you'll see what I mean.

It's French dictionaries that call pouvoir and devoir auxiliaries, not me - http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/modal.

In your second last paragraph, you're nearly there. But the primary auxiliaries - do, be, have, (which aren't modals) are mainly used for tense and voice, whereas the modal auxiliaries are mainly used for modality. The exception being future tenses which use the modal will, sometimes in combination with the primary auxiliaries do and have - I will be seeing him tomorrow - I will have finished it by Friday.

Ça va, Houston, il n'y a aucune problème. A Varosovie non plus. I meant English modals weren't inflected, I didn't say French ones weren't, obviously they are. This is a site about the English language, so I assume when I say modal or subjunctive without further qualification, people will understand I'm talking about modals or the subjunctive in English.

'That was why we didn't have any need to make life hard for ourselves by talking of modals.' - but that's what every English grammar book under the sun calls them. And the only reason I started talking about modals was because you suggested, insisted even, that 'BOTH clauses are subjunctive' in hypothetical conditionals (your capitals). But I'm afraid this is tosh - 'If he were a bit less shifty, I would trust him more.' - 'If he had worked harder at school, he could have got into university.' - The result clause of a hypothetical conditional uses verbs with the modal auxiliaries 'would, would have, could, could have' etc. This is not the subjunctive. That's why I started talking about modals.

I'm afraid that one of the problems I find with this discussion is that you use terms your own way, not as they are generally understood in English grammar. When you talk of the subjunctive, I suspect you are thinking that the English equivalent of a French, Spanish or German sentence in the subjunctive is somehow subjunctive in English. But the subjunctive is not a feeling, it is a specific grammatical form, and its use in each of these languages is different from in English. - Il faut que je sache.- I need to know - Nous cherchons quelqu'un qui puisse commencer immédiatement - We're looking for somebody who can start immediately - Both sentences use the subjunctive in French, but neither do in English.

Correction - I should have said modals have no person or number - they can occasionally express tense, or at least time.

@Jasper - the sentence I quoted was said by all three candidates before the British general election, at which time none of them were prime minister. And that's not a subjunctive were, but a plural were after none, another great arguing point.

When it comes to compound nouns, you can see some general principles, as have been discussed above, but there are many exceptions. You simply cannot draw up a hard and fast rule which covers everything. This is when you really do need a dictionary. See

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/compound-words.aspx
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/compounds.htm (scroll down to plurals)

@Brus - Thanks for visiting my website. I don't think I understand your first point. I clearly said that 'was' is indicative, but that 'were' for 1st and 3rd persons singular is subjunctive (all other past subjunctive forms are the same as indicative).

Unreal past - 'If I were prime minister, I would ...' - were for 1st and 3rd person singular here is usually accepted as being subjunctive (although I think the authors of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language disagree - calling it irrealis). While 'If I was prime minister, I would ... 'is thought of as indicative, but both are talking about a hypothetical condition - which is why we call it the unreal past.

I talked about 'were to' in a different section. - 'were to' is a compound subjunctive form which is usually thought to be more tentative ('were to have been' is just another form of 'were to'). 'If I were to offer you ... ', is more tentative than 'If I offered you ...'. Go to Wikipedia and scroll down to Compound forms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_subjunctive

I don't think I said that 'should' does the job of the subjunctive, I said that it was the British preference, because we prefer to avoid the subjunctive (see English Club, or any EFL website). You say - 'He recommends (that) the tablets should be taken after meals.' is wrong. But that is standard in British English, whereas 'He recommends (that) the tablets be taken after meals' is more standard in American English. Neither is more right nor wrong than the other. I think in your interpretations you are being far too literal. In its basic meaning 'should' is more or less interchangeable with 'ought to', but 'ought to' would not work in those examples.

Modals can have several different meanings and functions. Just look at how many functions 'would' has:

The past of will - This was the woman who would become his wife
In conditionals - If he came I would be very happy
To talk about someone's behaviour or habits - Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?
To talk about past habit - I used to live buy the seaside and every day I would go for a swim in the sea.
To complain about somebody's behaviour - I wish he would help more with the housework

And how can a modal verb be a main verb? It has no tense; it needs a main verb (aka lexical verb) in the bare infinitive to go with it. That's why it's called an auxiliary or helping verb. I'm not quite sure what you're saying about pouvoir and devoir. That they are not modal verbs but main verbs? They are definitely modal verbs - ''Pouvoir, devoir sont des auxiliaires modaux" (Le Robert Micro). In fact we probably got the expression modal auxiliary from French. The only difference between English and French is that English modals have no inflections. But they can be used in much the same way - Je dois partir - I must go - Elle ne peut (pas) venir avec nous - She can't come with us.

There are two types of auxiliary verb - the primary auxiliaries used to form tenses, and modals to add modality. The exceptions are future tenses which are formed with the modal verb 'will'.

am, is, are, was, were (for continuous tenses)
have, has, had (for perfect tenses)
do, does, did (for simple tenses)

can, could, will, would, shall, should, may, might, must, ought to (modals - nothing to do with the verb be)

There are also a couple of semi-modals - need and dare -they can be used as standard verbs with a basic auxiliary - he doesn't need to do it - or as a modal - he needn't do it.

As for being 'my modals', they are just the same as any grammatical definition of modal verb in English. Please visit any grammar website - for example the University of Wisconsin Platteville (not ESL) has a very good glossary here, check out primary and modal auxiliaries:

http://homepages.uwp.edu/canary/grammar_text/glossary_of_terms.html

I never said anything about modals being a mood, keep up! - As you say, English has three moods: indicative, subjunctive and imperative. But certain modals, 'would' and 'could', do a very similar job to the conditional mood in French and Spanish. And what do you mean 'over your teaching career there were no modals'? - You never said 'can', 'could' etc -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_verb
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/modal+verb

The grammatical definition for modals and explanations of the subjunctive are no different for ESL than they are for native speakers studying grammar at American universities. These are standard grammatical terms. And the subjunctive in English is very limited. What I provided you with wasn't 'extra', it was the basics. If we can't agree on basic definitions, the rest is pretty meaningless. And if you don't accept what all the references I've given you say, descriptionist and prescriptivist alike, there's not a lot more I can say.

@Jasper - No need to aplogise. I think in the end it comes down to personal choice. If people want to use 'whom', in places where it's not necessary that's fine by me, even if it sounds unnatural to many of us, which I would say for 'whom' not preceded by a preposition. In an article in the Telegraph for example, the style editor used 'whom' three times in defining relative clauses, where we normally drop the pronoun altogether - I can't remember the examples but can you imagine a song called 'The man whom I love'? And I'll never use it at the beginning of a question - even though some people seem to think Bo Diddley and The Doors should have sung 'Whom do you love?'.

No, if people want to use these, and don't mind sounding a bit pompous, that's fine by me. But when they start parroting some half-understood rule which is probably only used because it started as somebody's whim, and they call my English incorrect, or people like me ignorant, that get's my goat. Before preaching what others should do, I just wish they'd go and read up some experts on how language actually works and how the majority of educated people speak. Rant over.

@Brus - The subjunctive is not a modal, it is a Mood, which is a very specific grammatical form which I outlined above.It has nothing to do with the normal meaning of mood. Modal is shorthand for modal auxiliary verb, i.e 'can', 'could', 'will', 'would' etc. Hypothetical conditionals use 'would' or 'could' in the result clause for present and future conditions (what is known in the EFL/ESL world as a 2nd Conditional) and a modal perfect -'would have', 'could have' for past conditions (known as 3rd Conditional). You had both of these in your list, plus a 'Mixed Conditional' which mixes past and present. They use unreal past (or subjunctive only) in the if clause.

Here is a list of examples of the subjunctive collected by a fan of the subjunctive, who hates 'was' instead of 'were', so who is hardly likely to favour my view. But at least he and I and every other grammar website In know of, descriptionist or prescriptionist, are in absolute agreement as to what constitutes the subjunctive.

http://www.ceafinney.com/subjunctive/examples.html

This site is also pretty prescriptionist - note that it says that the modals 'could', would' and 'shoul' are sometimes used to express the same effect. But that doesn't make them the subjunctive.

http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000031.htm

I've just had a look at the English Club page on the subjunctive that Layman mentioned and they have it absolutely spot on - on structure, in the difference between formal and informal usage and in the difference between American and British Usage:

http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verbs-subjunctive.htm

And finally there is my own piece on my blog:

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2011/06/exploring-grammar-subjunctive.html

@Layman - Yes. It's used less in British English - for example we don't use it much in the present, in sentences like 'It is essential that she sit the exam this semester.' We prefer a construction with 'should' - 'It is essential that she should sit the exam this semester' (which is not subjunctive, whatever Brus might think) or informally the standard indicative - 'It is essential that she sits the exam this semester'.

Both GrammarGirl and EnglishClub are realiable sites on structure, although I don't always agree with GrammarGirl's conclusions. English Club is one of the best big ESL sites; see my comments above. Other good sites are Learn English at the British Council, Learning English at the BBC, UsingEnglish and esl.about.com and grammar.about.com.

I think one of the the reasons that there is so much disagreement is that some people's
interpretation of what the subjunctive is, is somewhat loose. Whether you use the subjunctive or not, is of course simply down to personal preference. And there Brus and I will never agree.