Chapter one Introduction
Subjunctive mood expresses counterfactual facts, including a main clause and subordinate clause. Usually considered only a grammatical phenomenon, it is in fact adopted as a writing skill to express some certain value and humanistic thought in literary works. There are studies on it from grammatical and pragmatic perspectives. And gradually, many scholars pay attention to it from cognitive ways to study its meaning construction, but few of them attempt to link it with literary works, where meaning constructions has its uniqueness. Since conceptual blending theory has dynamic properties and a particular process of meaning construction, the author shows a lot interests in association it with subjunctive mood and what intensively appeals to the author is the unique features of meaning constructions in literary works. In the 1990s, Fauconnier put forward conceptual blending theory which is one of the newest theories in the field of western linguistic and has a pushing drive in cognitive linguistic. The theory is so powerful in explaining that various scholars at home and abroad show a lot interest to it. And they has proved its forceful explanatory power in many perspectives, however few of them have tried to analyze the subjunctive mood in literary works comprehensively and systematically associating with this theory. Therefore, this thesis will attempt to apply the conceptual blending theory to analysis of subjunctive mood in literary works and try to associate linguistic with literature.
1.1 Background of the Study
There are a great many discussions about subjunctive mood of English grammar, and different people have different ideas and attitudes on it, so it becomes a controversial one in English language since it is here. For non-scholars, we come to it in the course of English learning and we usually are confused about it. For scholars at home or abroad, they state their different opinions towards subjunctive mood in regard to its classification, understanding and its meaning. And many scholars study its functions from different theories, and a few try to dig out its cognitive mechanism from different perspectives. All studies attempt to make subjunctive mood understood easily. As we all know, the importance of subjunctive mood gradually lost its inflection with evolution of history, and many people think that this grammar does not worth studying for there is little use. There are studies about the usage of subjunctive mood in English fiction and they find that different writers in different periods choose different expressions of subjunctive mood an
