IT won't be surprising at all if this basic grammar question still stumps not just a few English writers and speakers among us: "How do you know if a sentence that uses 'were' is indicative or subjunctive?" I say this because this happens to be a very-often asked reader's question in the almost 21 years that I've been writing this column.
So let's demystify this usage by doing a quick refresher of the uses of "were," which of course is the familiar past-tense form of the linking verb "be" in the third-person plural. In "The villagers were happy," for example, "be" takes the form "were" because "villagers" — the subject — is in the third-person plural and the action is in the past tense. But when the subject is in the third-person singular "villager" and the action is in the present tense, "be" takes the normal form "is": "The villager is happy.")
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