While I was looking at the use of the subjunctive in letters by Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestly for a paper for the conference Patriotism(e) & Prescriptivism(e) in Toronto, this August, I came across the following. In the second edition of his Rudiments of English Grammar Priestley discusses the decline of the subjunctive in favour of the indicative:

This conjunctive form of verbs, though our forefathers paid a pretty strict regard to it, is much neglected by many of our best writers […] So little is this form of verbs attended to, that few writers are quite uniform in their own practice with respect to it. We even, sometimes, find both the forms of a verb in the same sentence, and in the same construction (Priestley 1768: 119-120)

I found precisely this in one of Benjamin Franklin’s letters, where he uses both the indicative and the inflectional subjunctive forms with two verbs which refer to the same subject, combined by a coordinating conjunction.

Mr. Joseph Crellius is gone to Holland and I suppose may call at London before he returns, and settle his Daughter’s Affair [emphasis mine] (letter to William Strahan, 6 December 1750 – American Philosophical Society)

Was Franklin really confused here? Or, as this is the only instance of this I have found, is it a transcription error? The letter is available on the website The Papers of Benjamin Franklin

 

Could anyone help me find information on the history of the tag question? It is neither mentioned as a feature of Late Modern English grammar in Goerlach (2001) for the 18th century nor in Goerlach (1999) for the nineteenth, and yet they did occur. An example may be found in Kielkiewicz-Janowiak's study of the language of early New England women (Poznan 2002), i.e. "Heavy business, is it not?" (Theodosia Burr, 4 June 1803; p. 190). Where do they come from? I'd also welcome additional examples.

This term I made use of Bridget Cusack's reader called Everyday English 1500-1700 (1998). It is a very interesting collection of different text types, that seem of great interest to historical sociolinguistic studies. I wonder if there is anything like that for the Late Modern period?