grammatical mood

Also known as mood, grammatical mode, mode

grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality

AI overview

Grammatical mood is a feature of verbs that shows whether something is actually happening, imagined, commanded, or wished for. It matters because it helps speakers and writers communicate not just what they're saying, but how certain, possible, or real they believe it to be.

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Commons category: Grammatical moods

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In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. In other words, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, 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 inflection 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.)