It's about time
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Now it's time to clarify some of the details of what I'll call the I-T-PST construction (as in "It's time that I left"), introduced by Geoff Pullum here. In fact, there are three relevant constructions, differing in which inflectional form they have in the subordinate clause:
I-T-PST: It's time (that) he had some success.
I-T-PRS: It's time (that) he has some success.
I-T-BSE: It's time (that) he have some success.
(The labeling here anticipates some results of the discussion to follow.)
People differ as which of these constructions they have and, when they have several, whether the constructions differ semantically or pragmatically, and whether there are contexts in which one construction is preferred to another. There are probably subtle differences between the that and zero variants and between the contracted and uncontracted variants, and there's certainly more to be said about the modifier about, as in the title of this posting (there's also it's high time …). But here I'm going to talk about less subtle matters.
There's a fair amount of ground-clearing to do. Some of this repeats material in an old posting of mine on "losing" "the subjunctive", but that was a long time ago.
First, we need to distinguish inflectional forms of words from the constructions these forms occur in, and these from the meanings conveyed by these constructions. These three things are frequently confounded. One source of the confounds is the names customarily given to inflectional forms, which appear to be direct lines to meaning. But an inflectional form is just material that can be used in different constructions, each of which is associated with a meaning; the standard names are just labels, and as I've said repeatedly, labels are not definitions.
It's tempting to think that because one inflectional form is customarily labeled past (or preterite), by definition it refers to past time (or to time before some reference time). But there are contexts in which this is just wrong: the "modal remoteness" uses of PST discussed in CGEL (pp. 85-6), and the of PST in the construction I-T-PST, which has forward-looking semantics.
For the purposes of description, inflectional forms could be given entirely arbitrary labels (numbers or letters, say). And so could constructions. Semantics enters into things when we describe the meanings associated with particular constructions.
But for practical purposes, it's helpful to have labels that are at least suggestive — of formal characteristics or semantic characteristics or both. My own practice, when I think I need to be very careful, is to give labels to inflectional forms that in general suggest traditional names, like PST instead of past, PRS instead of present, and BSE instead of base form (also known as the bare form, the (unmarked) infinitive, and several other things). For constructions, I mostly use suggestive names (as above), but when I have to talk about many of them, I'll fall back on numbers.
Next complication: several commenters on Geoff's posting referred to the inflectional form in I-T-PST as "past subjunctive" or simply "subjunctive", using a traditional name for an inflectional form that is just barely distinguishable from PST (the two are distinct only for the verb BE, and then only in 1/3sg: if I/he were vs. because I/he was). Since the primary use of this form is in counterfactual conditionals, I've labeled it CFT. The question is: are the forms in I-T-PST actually PST, or are they CFT?
There is evidence on the matter, namely choice between was and were (or both) in
It's time that I/he was/were appointed chair.
CFT were doesn't fly at all for me here, and there are only four relevant ghits for {"it's time that I|he were"} (all of which look archaic to me), but if there are people who can go with were, then there's a fourth I-T construction, I-T-CFT.
[Added 4/18/09: Stephen Jones has come across this example with CFT in it:
He has spoken rudely of such sacrosanct characters as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ("It is time that [his] pedestal were dismounted") and Bertrand Russell ("He made a fool of himself").
This is from a 1952 article in Time about Mortimer J. Adler, of Great Books fame. Jones found the quotation about Oliver Wendell Holmes bizarre, as do I. But apparently Adler thought the I-T construction should have a CFT subordinate clause.]
On to what I've labeled I-T-BSE. If you have this variant, the verb in it is clearly BSE — the form used with infinitival to ("I want to have a good time"), with modal auxiliaries ("I will have a good time"), in imperatives ("Have a good time!"), in the complements of certain verbs ("I insisted he have a good time"), and in some other contexts. The BSE is identical to the non-3g PRS for almost all verbs, but 3sg PRS forms are distinct from BSE, and BE once again has a unique BSE form, be ("I want to be happy", "Be quiet!", "I insisted she be appointed chair", etc.). And we get "It's time she be appointed chair", or at least some people do. There are a modest numbers of ghits for {"it's time I|you|he|she|we|they be"} (though some of them are irrelevant hits for AAVE "invariant be"), so there does seem to be some I-T-BSE out there.
Several commenters discussed this variant in I-T examples (and with verbs like insist) under its traditional label, "present subjunctive", though in these contexts it's never distinct from the BSE and has little to do with the "past subjunctive", so the name is actively misleading. There's no reason to posit another inflectional form for verbs here; there are simply a number of different constructions with BSE VPs in them.