Tense of a clause embedded in a subjunctive statement

To be specific, "agglutinative" is an adjective that describes particular aspects of languages, but it may be attributed to entire languages if it is an overall general quality of them as a whole. What it means to be "agglutinative" is to go and carry out word-formation, and in more general usages of the term, marking of grammatical information on words by connecting multiple different units, known as morphemes, together, which express different overall ideas, and which are for the most part relatively independent from each other. This is as opposed to "analytic", which describes aspects of languages, and by extension entire languages, which rely on the usage of higher level syntactic structures involving words, such as word order, prepositions, and auxiliary/modal verbs, to communicate ideas, or "fusional" (often called "inflectional"), which is similar to the term "agglutinative" except that single morphemes may very well express multiple ideas together in an inseparable fashion, which may include word stems themselves, such as in the case of ablaut in strong (and mixed) verbs in Germanic languages.

The reason why Japanese is an agglutinative language is that it very strongly tends towards forming words out of many different suffixing morphemes tied together, which is shown in particular in the case of verbs (and stative verbs, that is, "i-adjectives"), where the only real fusional-type feature is the changing of vowels at the ends of verb stems in different usages. The only truly analytic aspects of Japanese are its use of grammatical particles, which are analytic because they apply to entire phrases, not just individual words as case markings like those in Finnish would, and because they can apply to other particles which in turn apply to other words.

Hello Testsuo and Uriel

Thanks for the replies. I know English speakers shift the tense of indirect speech to match with the tense of the finite verb of the sentence or clause embedding the speech in the case of the mood being indicative. But how about the case of the mood being subjunctive? As far as I know no grammar books mention any rules about this matter and I feel the choice of the tense varies even among native speakers. For example, you can come across online such a sentence like:
"If my ex-husband wanted, I would tell him I am happy now."
Here "would" is obviously the same as Edith used in her writing.

Hanako

I would like to know where she LIVES or

I would like to know where she LIVED?



I would like to know where she LIVED or

I would like to know where she HAD LIVED?





If I needed to say something, I would say she IS nice or she WAS nice?


Is there a shifting of the tenses with verbs in would-clause?

Deisje, all of your sentences are correct, they just mean different things.

I would like to know where she LIVES (now)

I would like to know where she LIVED? (before, or in the past)



I would like to know where she LIVED or

I would like to know where she HAD LIVED? (both are in the past, slightly different tenses))



If I needed to say something, I would say she IS nice or she WAS nice? (again, either, depending on the tense of the rest of the sentence)

>>I would like to know where she LIVED or

I would like to know where she HAD LIVED? (both are in the past, slightly different tenses))<<

The only difference between these two is if *something else* in some connected clause or related sentence is also being referred to in the simple past or present perfect, where then the latter comes *before* such, whereas the former is unspecified in relationship to such and may be usually treated as having occurred/been so at about the same time as such.

Hi, Hanako-san!

I cannot tell you whether "If my ex-husband wanted, I would tell him I am happy now." is grammtical, but my instinct tells me it is because of the word now. If you say, "... I was happy now.," it sounds illogical and awkward. But "... I was happy yesterday." sounds okay to me.

Hi, Deijse!

Uriel is right.

You can make your sentences much clearer by adding some words.

I'd like to know where she lives now.

I'd like to know where she lived last year.

I'd like to know where she had lived before she moved to Iraq two years ago. (Note: This explains what Travis explained above in mere 16 words.)

I'd say she was nice yesterday.

I'd say she is nice now.

Hanako,

It is like that simple because when you have Past Tense in the main sentence ,you have to have Past Tense in the subordinated sentence as well if you want to refer to a present action. You would use subjunctive in teh subordinated sentence to refer to a past action.