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some discussion...

Some discussion about "simplifying and structuring sections" in regards to harmonizing and disambiguating the entanglements
within English &tc. mood, mode, modal and modality has been moved from here to a work space. Thank you Ruakh.
(Help reduce "Redirects all over the place". There are many more than the few listed here.) — Ken^(talk) August 6, 2005

Aside the two moods I'm really familiar with (imperative/indicative), I'm not really sure that injunctive/subjunctive moods are different. Furthermore, I turned unsure whether there is a universal language independent mood description. Shall we just have examples from many languages, and let the language page itself define the ones used correctly?

I took out the injunctive mood from the main article. Hopefully someone who actually knows what it is will reinsert it. -- hajhouse

Actually, the Conditional is a potential but not realized action, seperate from the subjunctive's hypothetical actions, I think.

In French, Conditional and Subjunctive are different. -- Tarquin

== OBS! Avait is marked as a subjunctive, but it is an imperfect form - ait is the third person singular present subjunctive). This is a "unlikely"(ie the condition is unlikely to occur) si clause, so si is followed by imparfait. I suppose it is possible that at one point in time subjonctif imparfait(as in spanish) would have been used "Jean mangerait s'il eut faim" but that would be unusual today, much of past subjontif use seem to have been replaced by "easier" forms such as the imparfait, passe compose or plus-que-parfait. Thus it makes no sense to include the french version. Would be nice to have an expert clear things up on this page, things seem messy.

"The subjunctive part of the conditional version of "John eats if he is hungry" is:

   John would eat if he were hungry, in English;
   Johannes äße, wenn er hungrig wäre, in German;
   Jean mangerait s'il avait faim, in French;
   Juan comería si tuviera hambre, in Spanish."

==

It would be useful to see the distinction between subjunctive and hypothetical explained. Charmii 15:51, August 23, 2005 (UTC)

In Japanese, the negative is a distinct grammatical mood. Example: nagenu, throw, but negenai, not throw.

As native Japanese speaker, I am not sure this is right. -- Taku 23:25 Mar 17, 2003 (UTC)

In the Romance languages, subjunctives express like/desire, the *hypothesis* of an inference (the conditional expresses the *conclusion* of the inference), or estabilishing a conditional restriction on a statement -- in fact, both Japanese conditional forms ~eba/~tara would probably translate into subjunctives in Romance languages.

As for the injunctive, I seem to understand it is only attested in Indo-Iranian branch, and maybe in early Greek and Hittite, and it seems to indicate an "underspecified" form of a verb (whatever that means). -- Wtrmute

I've been doing some research, and I found a mention of a paper by Paul Kiparsky of Stanford link which mentions the injunctive as being a "moodless" mood in early Vedic sanskrit, that is, acquiring mood and tense from context rather than explicit marking, as opposed to an alternative view as merely mentioning rather than narrating or asserting an event.

This means that the injunctive should be either: (a) a mood which takes its aspect from context, or (b) a mood which is used for mentioning an event occurring (maybe translatable as "I remember that..."?) If I could get my hands on the paper proper, I could perhaps get a better handle on things. I'll keep everyone posted if I do. -- Wtrmute

Shouldn't this article say something about the use of "let's" in English to form the equivalent of the 1st person plural imperative? — Hippietrail 08:32, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Redirects all over the place

Just in case nobody's picked it up, several of the links to specific moods lower on the list (Eventive and Potential at the very least) simply redirect to this article. If anyone knows enough about the languages using them (Finno-Ugric languages all, by the sounds), it would be very handy indeed to create some articles on them and avoid the redirects. BigHaz 06:32, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Hi! Please, see Finnish language grammar. There are some information of moods. Henri Tapani Heinonen 16:22, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Jussive

Someone should add a Jussive section. That mood is mentionned in the Eventive article --Circeus 00:47, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

English Subjunctive

This article overstates English's loss of the subjunctive. In reality, almost everybody uses the subjunctive in English every day. People don't often realize this because there is no special form of the verb in English to express the subjunctive — it is identical in form to the past tense:

Indicative: I am a millionaire.

Formal subjunctive: I wish I were a millionaire.

Informal subjunctive: I wish I was a millionaire.

If there were truly no subjunctive mood in English we would say "I wish I am a millionaire" but everybody would agree this is ungrammatical whether they know what the subjunctive mood is or not. — Hippietrail 11:55, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC) >> Absolutely! Ken H 02:34:17, 2005-08-03 (UTC)

Not quite. It's true that in English the subjunctive and the indicative are usually the same; it's also true that formal English uses the subjunctive in constructions like "I wish I were...". But you've picked one of the few verbs where the indicative and the subjunctive are different. Were is the past subjunctive; was is the past indicative. So in informal English we use the past indicative in such constructions. As does French:

Si seulement j'étais millionnaire.

French clearly uses the imperfect indicative here; the imperfect subjunctive (never used) is je fusse; imperfect indicative is je sois. (Forgive me if I've made a mistake here, my French is a little rusty.)

The present subjunctive of to be is be - as in be that as it may.

Hope that clarifies matters! -- Blisco 08:59, 18 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. As long as you add that present subjunctive can be used to express hope of the future, "Would I be true..." while past subjunctive can be used to express counterfactual current state, "Would I were true..." Then you can explicate the differences in "If I be true...", "If I am true...", "If I were true..." and "If I was true..." Halfelven 10:10, 8 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"Would I were true..."? Even as an American English speaker who uses the subjunctive regularly (and overly in many cases) this doesn't sound grammatical at all. I don't think that the modal "would" can govern anything but the bare infinitive of the modified verb, yielding the only available past tense in this case "Would I have been true...", both "Would I was true", and "Would I were true" just don't sound like they fit in English at all. --Puellanivis 19:58, 8 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm slightly confused... I'm pretty sure that the 'informal' subjunctive is simply because native English speakers, not being taught what a 'subjunctive mood' is... don't understand why they go from 'I am' to 'I were'... it seems more natural to use the past tense, 'was.' The usage of 'were' seems ungrammatical if you were never taught it, and thus they use the prescriptively ungrammatical past tense, 'was'. As far as other uses of the English Subjunctive.. check out many formulaic subjunctives, such as "Heaven Forbid!" or "truth be told" among others... "Come what may" for another without the use of the verb "be". Retailmonica (talk) 15:46, 12 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Shouldn't there be a discussion of some of the proposed classification schemes for types of mood, e.g. epistemic and deontic modality? There doesn't seem to be an article on this topic yet. If I were to add something, would it belong on this page, or should a separate page (or pages) be created for it? --Savage 19:53, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC) >> Yes, but more is needed. Ken H 02:34:17, 2005-08-03 (UTC)

Also, is the term "mood" synonymous with "modality" (and therefore encompassing modal verbs and evidential particles), or is it limited to inflectional verb forms? If the latter, there should definitely be a page on modality as a general grammatical category. --Savage 19:53, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC) >> Controversial. There is such a section. Also please see above Simplifying sections. Ken H 02:34:17, 2005-08-03 (UTC)

'as in Afrikaans or French: "Je ne sais pas." ... as in Russian or Esperanto: "Li ne iras."'

This looks confusing (as 'je ne sais pas' doesn't seem to be Afrikaans), I find the mix lang examples all over the page a bit confusing, wouldn't it be better providing example pages of moods of several different languages? Thus, someone familiar with French could go to the French example page, and so forth.

What mood are the following sentences in: How I wonder what you are! How pretty that is! Could these be counted as interrogative because they're really asking "How (much) am I wondering what you are?" and "How pretty is that?"

Response : I would say the "How..." examples are indicative, since "how" is not acting as an interrogative but as an adverb - I [how] wonder, that is [how] pretty. There is no doubt in these examples, it is merely an idiom for saying something like "Nobody can guess how much I wonder what you are." or something along those lines.

Input from a nonexpert, only a humble user of the language. "I suggested that Paul read some books" is a common form for me (I grew up in England, 1950 - 80), although I now find, after moving to the U.S., I need to recast it to "I suggested that Paul read some books" to avoid misunderstanding. Perhaps this should be considered an older generation British English construction, but it was/is certainly not uncommon in that context.

What's the difference between the two? FilipeS 20:06, 22 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

So many people do not realize that "May The Force be with you," is a sentence in the subjunctive mood. So is, "Let God hold you in the palm of his hand." These are subjunctive because we have NO IDEA if either of these will ever be carried out, hence they can be contrafactual.98.67.166.78 (talk) 03:27, 30 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

conjunctive mood

"Conjunctive mood" in Latin links here, but there's no explanation of it here.

Performative?

Is a performative utterance considered a mood, a speech act, or both? Lucidish

'Performative' is a type of speech act. Performatives generally use indicative or other realis mood, but such things don't usually get much attention in speech act theory. Cnilep (talk) 22:41, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Grammatical mood == Grammatical voice?

Perhaps add a note at the beginning that these are one in the same. Otherwise re-direct a search for "grammatical voice" to this article.

They aren't the same. The active, passive, and middle voices have to do with changing the way semantic arguments of a verb (agent, patient, etc.) match up with its syntactic arguments (subject, direct object, etc.). That has nothing to do with the mood distinctions between imperative, interrogative, and so forth. --Jim Henry | Talk 19:48, 22 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Energetic mood

the arabic word "Ya-ktub-un" does not mean "he certainly writes" but "They are writing" so i think the whole paragraph is misleading. i would find a better example...

Renarrative mood

I suggested that article to be merged (better, redirected) to this one. It says that renarrative mood is specific to Bulgarian and Turkish, but I'm not sure whether it's the same as Admirative or is it something else? Examples, anyone? Duja 15:09, 31 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, they refer to the same thing. Again, as my contribution notes, the admirative patterns in Balkan languages are derived from, and form a subset of, similar Turkish constructs, except that in Turkish grammar these constructs are called (compound) inferential tenses; in fact, I don't see a renarrative mood mentioned in the Turkish_grammar page. Perhaps these features of Turkish should be mentioned or linked here and their influence on the Balkan admirative/renarrative mood made clearer. Apapa 00:32, 9 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

hi.

While I havent heard of renarrative before, if it marks "doubtful or nonwitnessed events", then it is simulataneously marking (1) evidentiality & (2) epistemic modality. However, if is equivalent to admirative, then it is marking mirativity and probably evidentiality as well (this is very common). I actually havent read what Turkish admirative mood does, but you can probably find the answer in Aikhenvald (2004, 2003) and DeLancey (1997). I be interested to know what you find out.

peace – ishwar (speak) 03:37, 8 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Apapa is quite right that they refer to (more or less) the same thing (the same morphological forms), but Ish_ishwar is also right to point out the difference between them (theoretically). In fact, the same morphological forms can be used to express "re-narrating" and "admirativity" (surprise). The first function is commonly regarded as primary in modern Bulgarian grammar. This doesn't mean, however, that the moods themselves are the same. The version of the article I just saw equated admirative with renarratice and then went on to define it as "expressing susrprise, doubt etc.". While admirative does express surprise by definition, the Bulgarian renarrative is certainly not defined as expresing surprise etc., at least not primarily. --91.148.159.4 20:31, 2 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

renarrative = admirative (= narrative = mediative)? Yes (or maybe no)

Yes, it is the same. It definitely should be merged. It's an enormous mess of equivalent terms I'm dealing with right now.

This was me in one of my earliest edits to wiki talk pages. I was wrong, as I didn't realize the nuances of the question at the time. (see above). --91.148.159.4 20:31, 2 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

see below for continuation of discussion.

"Negative Mood"

I am quite sure that Negative Mood should be excluded from that list. Negative and Affirmative are items of an own category and this has nothing to to with mood. A verb can per definition only get one single item of a category. What if you have a verb that in some context requires to be negative and subjunctive? I've never heard of a "negative mood" in linguistics. We should delete or move that section... —N-true 20:24, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Please vote at the Move proposal (negative) section below. - TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 02:41, 10 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

To merge or not to merge...

When is someone finally going to cut the cord and either have it merged or not? I know that there are many reasons as to why it should or shouldn't be merged but if we're going to keep discussing it, no one will ever be exposed to the renarrative mood.

Hell, I only just heard about it because I wanted to find out what kind of moods there are in languages. (I'm doing this because I'm creating a language of my own)

So let's be dramatic and imagine someone either creating a language too or having to do a paper, both with an interest in grammatical moods. Wouldn't it be fun and let's not forget easy, to type in grammatical moods and have a (semi)complete list of them all, including the renarrative mood?

I mean, my reason for coming here is to learn about things that I've heard and want more information about and to read completely new things. I'm practically certain that the majority of people come here for the same reason or am I horribly wrong? Thanks for reading.

Optative - To merge?

It seems kind of pointless to have a separate article for the optative mood when this article goes into the subject in more depth than the separate article does. IMO, these should be merged. -Yupik 21:37, 23 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed this gap as well. Malangthon 03:16, 21 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Interrogative Mood

This article states that Japanese has an interrogative mood, whereas the interrogative mood article implies that it doesn't, instead employing the syntax-particle pattern. I know that it does use a particle, but I'm uncertain of whether or not it has a mood. Could someone clarify this for me, as I think the article is potentially misleading otherwise. tychon 02:41, 12 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I just noticed this; since it is unclear what exactly is meant by Japanese having an interrogative mood, I have removed it. If someone can explain what was meant/justify the inclusion, we can restore it. --RJCraig 02:17, 24 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Indicative (evidential) mood and examples questioned

There's something fishy about both the explanation and one of the examples : "Paul is reading books" strikes me as just plain wrong, and is not a sentence I would ever use, whereas "Paul reads books" is fine. I would certainly not treat them as equivalent. "Paul is reading some books" works better and "Paul reads some books" is also fine. "Paul is signing letters" / "Paul signs letters" or "Paul is drinking coffee" / "Paul drinks coffee" also work. But in all these cases, the MEANING of the two sentences seems to differ subtly so that they are not equivalent. Also consider "Go away! Can't you see I'm working?", which I have uttered many times, vs "Go away! Can't you see I work?", which just doesn't ... well, work, really :-). "I am drinking/reading/working" seem to imply either immediacy or imminence of action in most cases, while "I drink/read/work" mostly seem to imply potentiality or statement of a property. However "I am working for them " and "I work for them" seem to be roughly equivalent. Heck, I just can't quite put my finger on it! Any linguists who can explain this, please?!? Daen 15:09, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"Paul is reading books" sounds wrong mostly because it seems to imply that Paul has the unnatural ability to read mutiple books simultaniously, though it could aslo mean that he is currently in the process of reading multiple books; a better example could be used. The thing that is confusing you is that "Paul reads books" exists out of time: it does not neccisarily mean that Paul is currently reading, but rather that reading is an acctivity in which Paul partakes. Phsyron 02:36, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ditching weird section about Category of mood

The section at the end, ==Category of mood after M. Y. Blokh==, appears to be copied (poorly) from some other source. It repeats information covered effectively in the article, and worse, it's confusing and needs cleaning up. I have commented out the offending section. ThePedanticPrick 21:08, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Mood versus modality

There are articles for Grammatical mood (basically a list of moods with brief explanations), Linguistic modality, and List of grammatical moods. There seems to be some redundancy here, but I'm not sure what should be merged into what... FilipeS 12:52, 7 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

IMO the list should go away (redirect here); the bottom part of Linguistic modality should be merged here. SIL's approach and definition seem reasonable: basically, they define "modality" as semantic category, while "mood" is its syntactic/gramatical realization. Duja► 13:33, 7 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

..and, btw, several "{{main}}" articles should be merged/redirected here and marked with {{R with possibilities}}, especially now when the software supports redirects to sections. I'm thinking of Realis, Irrealis, Alethic moods etc. There's no need to spread so little information across so many articles. Duja► 13:37, 7 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Merge of prohibitive mood

I have recommended that the content of the article prohibitive mood be merged into this article. It's a one-line article that, if I'm not mistaken, belongs under the "Irrealis moods" section. I will leave the actual performance of the merge to someone more knowledgeable on the subject than I. -- Black Falcon 00:00, 5 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]