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In linguistics, irrealis moods (abbreviated ) are the main set of 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 . They are used in statements without truth value (imperative, interrogative, subordinate, etc)
Every language has grammatical ways of expressing unreality. Linguists tend to reserve the term "irrealis" for particular morphological markers or clause. Many languages with irrealis mood make further subdivisions between kinds of irrealis moods. This is especially so among Algonquian languages such as Blackfoot.
| Subjunctive mood ( or ) | Event is considered unlikely (mainly used in dependent clauses). | "If I were to love you..." | |
| Conditional mood () | Event depends upon another condition. | "I would love you" | |
| Optative mood () | Event is hoped, expected, or awaited. | "May I be loved!" | |
| Jussive mood () | Event is pleaded, implored or asked. | "Everyone should be loved" | |
| Potential mood () | Event is probable or considered likely | "She probably loves me" | |
| Imperative mood () Prohibitive mood () | Event is directly ordered or requested by the speaker. Event is directly prohibited by the speaker. | "Love me!" "Do not love me" | |
| Desiderative ( or ) | Event is desired/wished by a participant in the state of affairs referred to in the utterance | "I wish he loved me." | |
| Dubitative mood () | Event is uncertain, doubtful, dubious. | "I think she loves me." | |
| Hypothetical () | Event is hypothetical, or it is counterfactual, but possible. | "I might love you if..." | |
| Presumptive mood () | Event is assumed, presupposed by the speaker. | "Knowing the way you love me ..." | |
| Permissive mood () | Event is permitted by the speaker. | "You may not love me..." | |
| Mirative mood () Admirative mood | Event is surprising or amazing (literally or in irony or sarcasm). | "Wow! They love me!", "Apparently they love me." | |
| Hortative mood () | Event is exhorted, implored, insisted or encouraged by speaker. | "Let us love!" | |
| () | Event is likely but depends upon a condition; a combination of the potential and conditional. | "I would probably love you if..." | |
| () | Event is requested by the speaker. | "Will you love me?" | Mongolian |
| Volitive mood () | Event is desired, wished or feared by the speaker. | "Would that you loved me!" / "God forbid that you love me!" | Japanese |
| Inferential mood ( or ) | Event is not witnessed and not confirmed. | "Something tells me she loves me." | |
| Necessitative () | Event is necessary, or it is both desired and encouraged; a combination of the Hortative mood and Jussive mood. | "It is necessary that you should love me." | |
| Interrogative () | Event is asked or questioned by the speaker | "Does he love me?" | |
| Benedictive mood () | Event is requested or wished by the speaker in a polite or honorific fashion. | "Would you please be so kind as to love me?" | |
| () | Event is presupposed or admitted as part of a refutation. | "Even if she loves me ..."; "Although she loves me ..." | |
| () | Event is prescribed by the speaker (though not demanded), but with the expectation that it will occur. | "Please do love me."; "Go ahead, love me." | Mongolian |
| () () () | Event is warned against happening. | "Beware loving me." |
Other uses of the subjunctive in English, as in "And not able to bring a lamb, then he shall bring for his trespass..." (KJV Leviticus 5:7), have become archaic or formal.Anita Mittwoch, Rodney Huddleston and Peter Collins. "The clause: Adjuncts." Pp. 745. Chapter 8 of . Statements such as "I shall ensure that immediately" often are formal, and often have been supplanted by constructions with the indicative, such as "I'll make sure that immediately". (In other situations, the verb form for subjunctive and indicative may be identical: "I'll make sure that 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).
In the Romance languages, the conditional form is used primarily in the apodosis (main clause) of conditional clauses, and in a few 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 language the conditional mood is used in both the apodosis and the protasis.
A further example of Finnish conditional (2025). 9781315743233, Routledge. ISBN 9781315743233 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-: Osta isin talon, jos ansaits isin paljon rahaa, just like in Hungarian, which uses the marker -na/-ne/-ná/-né: Ven nék egy házat, ha sokat keres nék. In Polish language, the conditional marker -by also appears twice: Kupił bym dom, gdy bym 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 would have 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"). This usage is heavily stigmatized ("les Si n'aiment pas les Ré !"). However, Jaurais su, je (ne) serais pas venu is more accepted, as a colloquial form. 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 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:
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" (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",Gonda, J., 1966. A concise elementary grammar of the Sanskrit language with exercises, reading selections, and a glossary. Leiden, E.J. Brill. 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.
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 gemination. In spoken language, the word kai "probably" is used instead, e.g., se kai tulee "he probably comes", instead of hän tullee.
Many languages, including English, use the bare verb stem to form the imperative (such as "go", "run", "do"). Other languages, such as Seri language 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".
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".Van Der Geer, AAE. 1995. Samskrtabhasa B1, cursus Sanskrit voor beginners and Samskrtabhasa B2, cursus Sanskrit voor gevorderden. Leiden: Talen Instituut Console 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 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".
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. The table below shows the conjugations for the presumptive mood copula in Hindi and Romanian with some exemplar usage on the right:
| +Presumptive Mood Conjugations ! colspan="2" rowspan="2" | Person ! colspan="3" | Singular ! colspan="3" | Plural |
Note:
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