Mood (linguistics)

In linguistics, grammatical mood (also mode) 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 (e.g. a statement of fact, of desire, of command, etc.). 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 inflexion of the verb itself.

Mood is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although the same word patterns are used for expressing more than one of these meanings at the same time in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages. (See tense–aspect–mood for a discussion of this.)

Some examples of moods are indicative, interrogatory, imperative, emphatic, subjunctive, injunctive, optative, potential. These are all finite forms of the verb. Infinitives, gerunds, and participles, which are non-finite forms of the verb, are not considered to be examples of moods.

Some Uralic Samoyedic languages have more than ten moods; Nenets has as many as sixteen. The original Indo-European inventory of moods consisted of indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative. Not every Indo-European language has all of these moods, but the most conservative ones such as Avestan, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit have them all. English has indicative, imperative, emphatic, and subjunctive moods; other moods, such as the conditional, do not appear as morphologically distinct forms.

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