In linguistics, irrealis moods (abbreviatedIRR) are the main set of grammatical moods that indicate that a certain situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking. This contrasts with the realis moods.
Every language has grammatical ways of expressing unreality. Linguists tend to reserve the term "irrealis" for particular morphological markers or clause types. Many languages with irrealis mood make further subdivisions between kinds of irrealis moods. This is especially so among Algonquian languages such as Blackfoot.[1]
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. Example: "I suggested that Paul eat an apple", Paul is not in fact eating an apple. Contrast this with the sentence "Paul eats an apple", where the verb "to eat" is in the present tense, indicative mood. Another way, especially in British English, of expressing this might be "I suggested that Paul should eat an apple", derived from "Paul should eat an apple."
Other uses of the subjunctive in English, as in "And if he be not able to bring a lamb, then he shall bring for his trespass..." (KJVLeviticus 5:7), have become archaic or formal.[13] Statements such as "I shall ensure that he leave immediately" often are formal, and often have been supplanted by constructions with the indicative, such as "I'll make sure [that] he leaves immediately". (In other situations, the verb form for subjunctive and indicative may be identical: "I'll make sure [that] you leave immediately.)
The subjunctive mood figures prominently in the grammar of the Romance languages, which require this mood for certain types of dependent clauses. This point commonly causes difficulty for English speakers learning these languages.
In certain other languages, the dubitative or the conditional moods may be employed instead of the subjunctive in referring to doubtful or unlikely events (see the main article).
The conditional mood (abbreviatedCOND) is used to speak of an event whose realization is dependent upon another condition, particularly, but not exclusively, in conditional sentences. In Modern English, it is a periphrastic construction, with the form would + infinitive, e.g., I would buy. In other languages, such as Spanish or French, verbs have a specific conditional inflection. This applies also to some verbs in German, in which the conditional mood is conventionally called Konjunktiv II, differing from Konjunktiv I. Thus, the conditional version of "John eats if he is hungry" is:
Hindi: जॉन खाता अगर भूख होती उसे, romanized:jôn khātā agar bhūkh hotī use
In the Romance languages, the conditional form is used primarily in the apodosis (main clause) of conditional clauses, and in a few set phrases where it expresses courtesy or doubt. The main verb in the protasis (dependent clause) is either in the subjunctive or in the indicative mood. However, this is not a universal trait: among others in German (as above) and in Finnish the conditional mood is used in both the apodosis and the protasis.
A further example of Finnish conditional[14] is the sentence "I would buy a house if I earned a lot of money", where in Finnish both clauses have the conditional marker -isi-: Ostaisin talon, jos ansaitsisin paljon rahaa, just like in Hungarian, which uses the marker -na/-ne/-ná/-né: Vennék egy házat, ha sokat keresnék. In Polish the conditional marker -by also appears twice: Kupiłbym dom, gdybym zarabiał dużo pieniędzy. Because English is used as a lingua franca, a similar kind of doubling of the word 'would' is a fairly common way to misuse an English language construction.
In French, while the standard language requires the indicative in the dependent clause, using the conditional mood in both clauses is frequently used by some speakers: Si j'aurais su, je ne serais pas venu ("If I'd've known, I wouldn't have come") instead of Si j'avais su, je ne serais pas venu ("If I had known, I wouldn't have come"). However, this usage is heavily stigmatized. In the literary language, past unreal conditional sentences as above may take the pluperfect subjunctive in one clause or both, so that the following sentences are all valid and have the same meaning as the preceding example: Si j'eusse su, je ne serais pas venu; Si j'avais su, je ne fusse pas venu; Si j'eusse su, je ne fusse pas venu.
In English, too, the would + infinitive construct can be employed in main clauses, with a subjunctive sense: "If you would only tell me what is troubling you, I might be able to help".
The optative mood expresses hopes, wishes or commands. Other uses may overlap with the subjunctive mood. Few languages have an optative as a distinct mood; some that do are Albanian, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Finnish, Avestan (it was also present in Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of the aforementioned languages except for Finnish).
In Finnish, the mood may be called an "archaic" or "formal imperative", even if it has other uses; nevertheless, it at least expresses formality. For example, the ninth Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with:
Älköön
NEG.IMP.3SG
ketään
anyone.PART
pidätettäkö
arrest.IMP
mielivaltaisesti
arbitrarily
Älköön ketään pidätettäkö mielivaltaisesti
NEG.IMP.3SG anyone.PART arrest.IMP arbitrarily
"No one shall be arrested arbitrarily" (lit. "Not anyone shall be arrested arbitrarily") Unknown glossing abbreviation(s) (help);
where älköön pidätettäkö "shall not be arrested" is the imperative of ei pidätetä "is not arrested". Also, using the conditional mood -isi- in conjunction with the clitic -pa yields an optative meaning: olisinpa "if only I were". Here, it is evident that the wish has not been fulfilled and probably will not be.
In Sanskrit, the optative is formed by adding the secondary endings to the verb stem. The optative, as other moods, is found in active voice and middle voice. Examples: bhares "may you bear" (active) and bharethaas "may you bear [for yourself]" (middle). The optative may not only express wishes, requests and commands, but also possibilities, e.g., kadaacid goshabdena budhyeta "he might perhaps wake up due to the bellowing of cows",[15] doubt and uncertainty, e.g., katham vidyaam Nalam "how would I be able to recognize Nala?" The optative may further be used instead of a conditional mood.
The jussive mood (abbreviatedJUS) expresses plea, insistence, imploring, self-encouragement, wish, desire, intent, command, purpose or consequence. In some languages, this is distinguished from the cohortative mood in that the cohortative occurs in the first person and the jussive in the second or third. It is found in Arabic, where it is called the مجزوم (majzūm), and also in Hebrew and in the constructed language Esperanto. The rules governing the jussive in Arabic are somewhat complex.
Potential
The potential mood (abbreviatedPOT) is a mood of probability indicating that, in the opinion of the speaker, the action or occurrence is considered likely. It is used in many languages, including in Finnish,[16]Japanese,[17] and Sanskrit (including its ancestor Proto-Indo-European),[18] and in the Sami languages. (In Japanese it is often called something like tentative, since potential is used to refer to a voice indicating capability to perform the action.)
In Finnish, it is mostly a literary device, as it has virtually disappeared from daily spoken language in most dialects. Its suffix is -ne-, as in *men + ne + e → mennee "(s/he/it) will probably go". Some kinds of consonant clusters simplify to geminates. In spoken language, the word kai "probably" is used instead, e.g., se kai tulee "he probably comes", instead of hän tullee.
The imperative mood expresses direct commands, requests, and prohibitions. In many circumstances, using the imperative mood may sound blunt or even rude, so it is often used with care. Example: "Paul, do your homework now". An imperative is used to tell someone to do something without argument.
Many languages, including English, use the bare verb stem to form the imperative (such as "go", "run", "do"). Other languages, such as Seri and Latin, however, use special imperative forms.
In English, second person is implied by the imperative except when first-person plural is specified, as in "Let's go" ("Let us go").
The prohibitive mood, the negative imperative may be grammatically or morphologically different from the imperative mood in some languages. It indicates that the action of the verb is not permitted, e.g., "Do not go!" (archaically, "Go not!"). In Portuguese and Spanish, for example, the forms of the imperative are only used for the imperative itself, e.g., "vai embora!" "¡vete!" ("leave!"), whereas the subjunctive is used to form negative commands, e.g., "não vás embora!" "¡no te vayas!" ("don't leave!").
In English, the imperative is sometimes used to form a conditional sentence: e.g., "Go eastward a mile, and you will see it" means "If you go eastward a mile, you will see it".
Whereas the optative expresses hopes, the desiderative mood expresses wishes and desires. Desires are what we want to be the case; hope generally implies optimism toward the chances of a desire's fulfillment. If someone desires something but is pessimistic about its chances of occurring, then one desires it but does not hope for it. Few languages have a distinct desiderative mood; three that do are Sanskrit, Japanese, and Proto-Indo-European.
In Japanese the verb inflection -tai expresses the speaker's desire, e.g., watashi wa asoko ni ikitai "I want to go there". This form is treated as a pseudo-adjective: the auxiliary verb garu is used by dropping the end -i of an adjective to indicate the outward appearance of another's mental state, in this case the desire of a person other than the speaker (e.g. Jon wa tabetagatte imasu "John appears to want to eat").
In Sanskrit, the infix -sa-, sometimes -isa-, is added to the reduplicated root, e.g. jíjīviṣati "he wants to live" instead of jī́vati "he lives".[19] The desiderative in Sanskrit may also be used as imminent: mumūrṣati "he is about to die". The Sanskrit desiderative continues Proto-Indo-European *-(h₁)se-.
The dubitative mood is used in Ojibwe, Turkish, Bulgarian and other languages. It expresses the speaker's doubt or uncertainty about the event denoted by the verb. For example, in Ojibwe, Baawitigong igo ayaa noongom translates as "he is in Baawitigong today." When the dubitative suffix -dog is added, this becomes Baawitigong igo ayaadog noongom, "I guess he must be in Baawitigong."[20]
Presumptive
The presumptive mood is used in Romanian and Hindi to express presupposition or hypothesis, regardless of the fact denoted by the verb, as well as other more or less similar attitudes: doubt, curiosity, concern, condition, indifference, inevitability. Often, for a sentence in presumptive mood, no exact translation can be constructed in English which conveys the same nuance.
The Romanian sentence, acolo s-o fi dus "he must have gone there" shows the basic presupposition use, while the following excerpt from a poem by Eminescu shows the use both in a conditional clause de-o fi "suppose it is" and in a main clause showing an attitude of submission to fate le-om duce "we would bear".
De-o fi una, de-o fi alta... Ce e scris și pentru noi,
Bucuroși le-om duce toate, de e pace, de-i război.
Be it one, be it the other... Whatever fate we have,
We will gladly go through all, be it peace or be it war
In Hindi, the presumptive mood can be used in all the three tenses. The same structure for a particular grammatical aspect can be used to refer to the present, past and future times depending on the context.[21][22] The table below shows the conjugations for the presumptive mood copula in Hindi and Romanian with some exemplar usage on the rightː
The hortative or hortatory mood is used to express plea, insistence, imploring, self-encouragement, wish, desire, intent, command, purpose or consequence. It does not exist in English, but phrases such as "let us" are often used to denote it. In Latin, it is interchangeable with the jussive.
The inferential mood (abbreviatedINFER or INFR) is used to report a nonwitnessed event without confirming it, but the same forms also function as admiratives in the Balkan languages in which they occur. The inferential mood is used in some languages such as Turkish to convey information about events that were not directly observed or were inferred by the speaker. When referring to Bulgarian and other Balkan languages, it is often called renarrative mood; when referring to Estonian, it is called oblique mood. The inferential is usually impossible to distinguish when translated into English. For instance, indicative Bulgarian той отиде (toy otide) and Turkish o gitti translates the same as inferential той отишъл (toy otishal) and o gitmiş — with the English indicative he went.[23] Using the first pair, however, implies very strongly that the speaker either witnessed the event or is very sure that it took place. The second pair implies either that the speaker did not in fact witness it taking place, that it occurred in the remote past, or that there is considerable doubt as to whether it actually happened. If it were necessary to make the distinction, then the English constructions "he must have gone" or "he is said to have gone" would partly translate the inferential.
Related Research Articles
The imperative mood is a grammatical mood that forms a command or request.
The subjunctive 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 vary from language to language. The subjunctive is one of the irrealis moods, which refer to what is not necessarily real. It is often contrasted with the indicative, a realis mood which principally indicates that something is a statement of fact.
The verbal morphology of Armenian is complicated by the existence of two main dialects, Eastern and Western. The following sketch will be a comparative look at both dialects.
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Conditional sentences are natural language sentences that express that one thing is contingent on something else, e.g. "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the main clause of the sentence is conditional on the dependent clause. A full conditional thus contains two clauses: a dependent clause called the antecedent, which expresses the condition, and a main clause called the consequent expressing the result.
Dryer defined three different types of negative markers in language. Beside negative particles and negative affixes, negative verbs play a role in various languages. The negative verb is used to implement a clausal negation. The negative predicate counts as a semantic function and is localized and therefore grammaticalized in different languages. Negation verbs are often used as an auxiliary type which also carries φ-feature content. This could be visualized for example in the inflectional character of the negation verb while combined with the main verb. Dryer observes a tendency to place the negation verb before the finite verb. Miestamo researched four different types of negations and proposed a distinction between symmetric negation in which a negative marker is added and asymmetric negation in which, beside the added negation marker, other structural changes appear.
The jussive is a grammatical mood of verbs for issuing orders, commanding, or exhorting. English verbs are not marked for this mood. The mood is similar to the cohortative mood, which typically applies to the first person by appeal to the object's duties and obligations, and the imperative, which applies to the second person. The jussive however typically covers the first and third persons. It can also apply to orders by their author's wish in the mandative subjunctive, as in the English, "The bank insists that she repay her debt."
A realis mood is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentences. Most languages have a single realis mood called the indicative mood, although some languages have additional realis moods, for example to express different levels of certainty. By contrast, an irrealis mood is used to express something that is not known to be the case in reality.
The optative mood is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope regarding a given action. It is a superset of the cohortative mood and is closely related to the subjunctive mood but is distinct from the desiderative mood. English has no morphological optative, but various constructions impute an optative meaning. Examples of languages with a morphological optative mood are Ancient Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Georgian, Friulian, Kazakh, Kurdish, Navajo, Old Prussian, Old Persian, Sanskrit, Turkish, and Yup'ik.
The conditional mood is a grammatical mood used in conditional sentences to express a proposition whose validity is dependent on some condition, possibly counterfactual.
While the English language lacks distinct inflections for mood, an English subjunctive is recognized in most grammars. Definition and scope of the concept vary widely across the literature, but it is generally associated with the description of something other than apparent reality. Traditionally, the term is applied loosely to cases in which one might expect a subjunctive form in related languages, especially Old English and Latin. This includes conditional clauses, wishes, and reported speech. Modern descriptive grammars limit the term to cases in which some grammatical marking can be observed, nevertheless coming to varying definitions.
In linguistics, speech or indirect discourse is a grammatical mechanism for reporting the content of another utterance without directly quoting it. For example, the English sentence Jill said she was coming is indirect discourse while Jill said "I'm coming" would be direct discourse. In fiction, the "utterance" might amount to an unvoiced thought that passes through a stream of consciousness, as reported by an omniscient narrator.
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying. The term is also used more broadly to describe the syntactic expression of modality – that is, the use of verb phrases that do not involve inflection of the verb itself.
In Old English, The subjunctive mood is a flexible grammatical instrument for expressing different gradients in thought when referring to events that are not stated as fact. In modern English only remnants of a once complex system of separate conjugations exist. Where Old English tended to use conjugation to concisely express meaning modern English instead relies on modal constructions which typically require an extra word.
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In the grammar of Ancient Greek, an aorist is a type of verb that carries certain information about a grammatical feature called aspect. For example, an English speaker might say either "The tree died" or "The tree was dying," which communicate similar things about the tree but differ in aspect. In ancient Greek, these would be stated, respectively, in the aorist and imperfect. The aorist describes an event as a complete action rather than one that was ongoing, unfolding, repeated, or habitual.
The optative mood is a grammatical mood of the Ancient Greek verb, named for its use as a way to express wishes.
Portuguese verbs display a high degree of inflection. A typical regular verb has over fifty different forms, expressing up to six different grammatical tenses and three moods. Two forms are peculiar to Portuguese within the Romance languages:
The subjunctive mood along with the indicative, optative, and imperative, is one of the four moods of the Ancient Greek verb. It can be used both in the meaning "should" and in the meaning "may".
Hindustani verbs conjugate according to mood, tense, person, number, and gender. Hindustani inflection is markedly simpler in comparison to Sanskrit, from which Hindustani has inherited its verbal conjugation system. Aspect-marking participles in Hindustani mark the aspect. Gender is not distinct in the present tense of the indicative mood, but all the participle forms agree with the gender and number of the subject. Verbs agree with the gender of the subject or the object depending on whether the subject pronoun is in the dative or ergative case or the nominative case.
References
↑ Bar-El, Leora; Denzer-King, Ryan (2008). "Irrealis in Blackfoot?"(PDF). Workshop on American Indigenous Languages. 19: 7–9. Retrieved 3 September 2017.
1 2 "Optative Mood". SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 2015-12-03. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
↑ "Jussive Mood". SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 2015-12-03. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
1 2 "Imperative Mood". SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 2015-12-03. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
↑ "Prohibitive Mood". SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 2015-12-03. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
1 2 "Dubitative Mood". SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 2015-12-03. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
1 2 "Hypothetical Mood". SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 2015-12-03. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
↑ Loos, Eugene E.; Anderson, Susan; Day, Dwight H. Jr.; Jordan, Paul C.; Wingate, J. Douglas (eds.). "What is permissive mood?". Glossary of linguistic terms. SIL International. Retrieved 2009-12-28.
↑ Smyth, Herbert (1984). Greek Grammar. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp.403–404 (§1797–1799). ISBN0-674-36250-0.
↑ "Precative Mood". SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 2015-12-03. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
↑ "Volitive Modality". SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 2015-12-03. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
↑ Anita Mittwoch, Rodney Huddleston and Peter Collins. "The clause: Adjuncts." Pp.745. Chapter 8 of (Huddleston & Pullum 2002).
↑ Karlsson, Fred (2015). Finnish: An Essential Grammar. London: Routledge. ISBN9781315743233.
↑ Gonda, J., 1966. A concise elementary grammar of the Sanskrit language with exercises, reading selections, and a glossary. Leiden, E.J. Brill.
↑ Tatui Baba, An Elementary Grammar of the Japanese Language (1888), p. 18.
↑ Ratnakar Narale, Sanskrit for English Speaking People (2004), p. 332.
↑ Van Der Geer, AAE. 1995. Samskrtabhasa B1, cursus Sanskrit voor beginners and Samskrtabhasa B2, cursus Sanskrit voor gevorderden. Leiden: Talen Instituut Console
↑ For a more precise rendering, it would be possible to also translate these as "he reportedly went" or "he is said to have gone" (or even "apparently, he went") although, clearly, these long constructions would be impractical in an entire text composed in this tense.
Sources
Huddleston, Rodney D.; Pullum, Geoffrey K., eds. (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 1860. ISBN0-521-43146-8.
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