About the Subjunctive

A reader asks:
Does the subjunctive change in different tenses?

Or which of these are wrong/right:

Maria talks about it as if it were an alien / Maria talks about it as if it is an alien

Maria talked about it as if it were an alien <-- this is 'normal' were subjunctive usage?

If there is a tense set far back in the past, it seems that the verb should follow on:

Maria used to talk about it as if it were an alien / Maria used to talk about it as if it had been an alien.

Am I muddling the 'were' of the past tense and the 'were' of the subjunctive?

The subjunctive is a tough subject for native English speakers because it's a fairly uncommon usage. We should use it when we're discussing something that isn't factually true:
If I were you, I'd apply for the scholarship.
If we were in Mexico, we could go to Cancún.

I'm not you, and we're not in Mexico, so I have to use the subjunctive. But that "were" sounds a lot like the past tense, so it's a bit confusing.

We can also use the subjunctive with other odd verbs:
I move that the minutes be accepted as read.
Be it resolved, that this house support the prime minister's decision.

The minutes haven't been accepted yet, so we say "be accepted" instead of "are accepted." As soon as we get a vote, the chair can say, "The minutes are accepted as read." And once the house has passed the motion, the Speaker can say: "It is resolved that this house supports the prime minister's decision."

So in the sentences provided by my reader, we should say: "Maria talks about it as if it were an alien." We don't know of any aliens yet, so we have to use the subjunctive. The same is true even if Maria talked about it back in 1989: "Maria used to talk about it as if it were alien."

It's easy to confuse verb tenses with the subjunctive. That's one reason why fewer and fewer English speakers use it.

Comments

[Brett]

As the _Cambridge Grammar of the English Language_ explains, there used to be a fully functional subjunctive mood in English that had both present and past tenses. The only vestige of the "past-tense subjunctive" that is in any way distinguishable from the regular past tense is the 'were' shape of the verb 'be' in the first and third person singular. Because of the extremely limited scope of this usage, the CGEL suggests that it has come unglued from the "past subjunctive" and proposes that we simply call it an 'irrealis' form. The "present subjunctive", in contrast, is alive and well and may be used with any verb. It is formed using the plain form as Crawford has explained above.

[Murphy]

Unlike the indicative mood, which has six tenses, the good old subjunctive has four.

[Murphy]

Here's a sentence that contains TWO subjunctives: IF I HAD BEEN BROOKLYN'S MANAGER BACK THEN, I WOULD HAVE WALKED BOBBY THOMSON.
The subordinate clause contains a past perfect subjunctive, while the principal clause houses a simple past subjuctive with, of course, a present perfect noun infinitive as its direct object.