Mood. Although we won’t examine this point in grammatical detail, verb
phrases include a feature of verbs known asmood.Mood indicates the
factuality or likelihood of the action or conditionality expressed by the verb,
and it also can express politeness. Mood is interesting, in part, because we com-
municate this information in verbs without even thinking about it.
There are three moods in English:
- Indicative—used to state facts
Example: Buggsy owned the casino. - Imperative—used to express commands
Example: Stop the car! - Subjunctive—used to express matters contrary to fact, conditionality,
hypotheticals, wishes, and politeness in making requests
The first two moods are fairly concrete, but the subjunctive mood is subtle
and sometimes complicated because it applies under five different conditions.
Contrary-to-fact statements always and expressions of conditionality some-
times require a dependent clause; this clause begins with the wordifor
whether—depending on the nature of the statement, for the words are not syn-
onymous in formal Standard English.
Also, the subjunctive verb form is interesting. In some cases, such as con-
trary-to-fact statements, the verb form is in the past tense in the dependent as
122 CHAPTER 4
Sentence 4.23: Buggsy bought his wife a very expensive emerald necklace.