Mood

MOOD

• Mood is an indication of the speaker’s attitude towards what he or she is talking about, whether the event is considered fact or nonfact.

Slide 2

• The indicative is the mood of fact; it is expressed by the simple and compound tenses of the verb.
• Nonfact encom-passes a number of different degrees of reality, including wishes, desires, requests, warn-ings, prohibitions, commands, predictions, possibilities, and contrary-to-fact occurrences. It has two primary subcategories, the imperative and the subjunctive.

Slide 3

• In English the imperative has a special syntactic form: it is a subjectless sentence containing a bare form of the verb, as in Go! Be quiet!, Don’t disturb me!.
• The subjunctive is the other non-fact mood. In Present-day English, the subjunctive is expressed by the modal auxiliaries or their phrasal equivalents, as in:
• He may leave. You shouldn’t wait.
• I can´t find my keys. Would you pass the salt?
• It might rain. You ought to try harder.
• I have to run an errand. We have got to be more careful.