Like the German Konjunktiv I, the morphologically marked subjunctive in Dutch is a relic of older stages of the language. It is mainly found in the formal/archaic register; clear examples can be found in the first five lines of the 1951 translation of het Onzevader (the Lord's Prayer) by theNederlands Bijbelgenootschap in (215a). In colloquial speech, the subjunctive is only found in formulaic expressions such as (215b).

The examples in (215) show that the subjunctive is normally formed by adding the suffix -e to the stem of the verb, but there are also some irregular forms, like the conjunctive forms of the verb zijn in (216a). The Dutch subjunctive is normally used in the formation of clauses that are not declarative or interrogative. It may express incitements/wishes, as in the examples in (215), but also acquiescence, as in (216a). Example (216b) shows that the subjunctive normally occupies the first or the second position in the main clause, and must therefore be considered a finite verb form.

      That the morphologically marked subjunctive is no longer part of colloquial speech is clear from the fact that wishes, incitements, etc. are generally expressed by other means like modal (ad)verbs and periphrases. A clear example of this can be found in the 2004 Bible translation by theNederlands Bijbelgenootschap, in which the subjunctives in het onzevader in (215a) are replaced by a construction with the verb laten'to make'; see Section 5.2.3.4, sub VI, for more discussion of the laten-construction in (217).

For this reason we will not extensively discuss the present subjunctive, but refer the reader to Haeseryn et al. (1997:103ff.) for details concerning the relics of this category in the present-day language, while noting that the present subjunctive can still be recognized in certain lexical items, like the preposition dankzij'thanks to' and fixed lexical expressions like koste wat het kost'at all costs' and godzijdank'thank God'.

The German past subjunctive (Konjunktiv II) is much more productive than the present subjunctive (Konjunktiv I) and is normally used to refer to non-actualized eventualities or (in literary German) in contexts of reported speech to express lack of commitment to the truth of the proposition by the speaker; see, e.g., Drosdovski (1995:156ff.) and Palmer (2001). Dutch differs from German in that it does not have a special morphological verb form to express the past subjunctive; a case mentioned in Haeseryn et al. (1997) that can occasionally still be found in writing is ware, but it seems that most speakers only use this form in the fixed expression als het ware'so to speak'.

      It seems that in many cases, German past subjunctive constructions can simply be translated in Dutch by means of a regular past-tense form. In order to give an impression of the semantic difference between the simple past and the past subjunctive in German, consider the examples in (219), taken from Erb (2001:69).

Placement of the simple past verb in the initial position of the sentence, as in (219a), results in a regular question interpretation, whereas placement of the past subjunctive in first position, as in (219b), triggers an irrealis interpretation: the speaker expresses a wish. The German examples in (219) can readily be translated by means of the examples in (220) with the past-tense form was'was'.

The meaning difference between the two Dutch examples is completely parallel to that between the two German examples in (219). This may suggest that Dutch is like German in that it also has a past subjunctive, albeit that the form of the Dutch past subjunctive happens to be identical to that of the simple past. One argument in favor of this suggestion is that the interrogative construction can readily occur in the present, whereas the irrealis construction cannot.

The use of the past tense in irrealis contexts is very pervasive in Dutch, and the examples in (222) show that the past tense can be expressed both on main verbs and on non-main verbs.

It should be noted, however, that the irrealis meaning only arises in examples like (220b) and (222) if a modal particle like maar is present; the examples in (223) show that without such a particle the irrealis reading becomes impossible. The unacceptability of these examples therefore suggests that the irrealis reading arises as a result of combining the past tense with modal particles of this type.

      It is also very common to express irrealis without the use of a modal particle by using a past-tense form of an epistemic modal. Such verbs are used to provide the speaker's judgment on the likelihood that a specific proposition is true: by using, e.g., the modal verb zullen in Jan zal komen morgen'Jan will come tomorrow', the speaker indicates that he has sufficient evidence to support his claim that the proposition morgen komen (Jan) is/will be true; see Section 1.5.2, sub II, for a more detailed discussion. The irrealis reading arises as a result of contextual information: the counterfactual reading of the first conjunct in (224), for example, arises due to the fact that the second conjunct indicates that the assessment of the speaker-in-the-past has been incorrect; see Section 1.5.4 for a more extensive and careful discussion.

The discussion above suggests that the irrealis reading arises as the result of temporal, modal and contextual information. The syntactic construction as a whole may also provide clues that an irrealis reading is intended. Conditional constructions in the past tense like those in (225), for example, are often construed with a counterfactual reading of the embedded conditional clause. Section 1.5.4 will show that this counterfactual reading is again triggered by contextual information. The primed examples show conditional clauses can also surface with the past-tense form of zullen with no conspicuous change in meaning.

      A special case is the past-tense form of the verb hebben. The finite verb had in (222b) above can be interpreted as the regular perfect auxiliary hebben, but it seems that this is not always the case. Consider the examples in (226a&b) with the deontic modal verb moeten'to be obliged'; it seems that the perfect-tense counterpart of the simple present example in (226a) is as given in (226b). The crucial example is (226c), in which we find a second instance of hebben, which must occur in the past tense and which triggers a counterfactual reading. The fact that there already is a perfect auxiliary in the clause makes it quite implausible that the finite verb had also has this function.

It further seems that "non-perfect" had is much higher in the structure than the perfect auxiliary hebben'to have'. This will be clear from the examples in (227): whereas (227a) shows that the modal verb zullen is like English will in that it normally cannot be embedded as infinitive under some other verb (including the perfect auxiliary) and therefore normally occurs as a finite verb, example (227b) shows that it can readily be embedded as an infinitive under past "subjunctive" had.

The examples in (226) and (227) perhaps suggest that in certain cases the past-tense form had should be considered a genuine past subjunctive form. The other examples in this subsection, on the other hand, strongly suggest that with other verbs it is not just the past tense that trigger the irrealis meaning but that certain modal and contextual information is also relevant: Section 1.5.4 will argue that in many cases pragmatic considerations can indeed be used to account for such readings, which suggests that Dutch does not have an abstract past subjunctive that is morphologically identical to the past.