Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The English subjunctive is realized as a finite but tenseless clause.Subjunctive clauses use a bare or plain verb form, which lacks any inflection.For instance, a subjunctive clause would use the verb form "be" rather than "am/is/are" and "arrive" rather than "arrives", regardless of the person and number of the subject.
The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of an utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude toward it.Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used ...
The subjunctive mood, sometimes called conjunctive mood, has several uses in dependent clauses. Examples include discussing hypothetical or unlikely events, expressing opinions or emotions, or making polite requests (the exact scope is language-specific). A subjunctive mood exists in English, but it often is not obligatory.
The counterfactual example uses the fake tense form "owned" in the "if" clause and the past-inflected modal "would" in the "then" clause. As a result, it conveys that Sally does not in fact own a donkey. English has several other grammatical forms whose meanings are sometimes included under the umbrella of counterfactuality.
English has indicative, imperative, conditional, and subjunctive moods. Not all the moods listed below are clearly conceptually distinct. Individual terminology varies from language to language, and the coverage of, for example, the "conditional" mood in one language may largely overlap with that of the "hypothetical" or "potential" mood in ...
The subjunctive mood in Old English can, theoretically, be traced back to its origins in the Indo-European proto language i.e. the reconstructed hypothetical proto language that is deemed to be the parent of many language families.
The subjunctive mood form is used in dependent clauses and in situations where English would use an infinitive (which is absent in Greek). There is a perfect form in both tenses, which is expressed by an inflected form of the imperfective auxiliary verb έχω "have" and an invariant verb form derived from the perfective stem of the main verb.
Indicative mood, in English, refers to finite verb forms that are not marked as subjunctive and are neither imperatives nor conditionals. They are the verbs typically found in the main clauses of declarative sentences and questions formed from them, as well as in most dependent clauses (except for those that use the subjunctive).