Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of an utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude toward it.Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used ...
The English subjunctive is realized as a finite but tenseless clause.Subjunctive clauses use a bare or plain verb form, which lacks any inflection.For instance, a subjunctive clause would use the verb form "be" rather than "am/is/are" and "arrive" rather than "arrives", regardless of the person and number of the subject.
1 In modern usage, the imperfect indicative usually replaces the imperfect subjunctive in this type of sentence. 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.
A conditional sentence usually contains two clauses: an if-clause or similar expressing the condition (the protasis), and a main clause expressing the conditional circumstance (the apodosis). In English language teaching, conditional sentences are classified according to type as first, second or third conditional; there also exist "zero ...
The subjunctive mood form is used in dependent clauses and in situations where English would use an infinitive (which is absent in Greek). There is a perfect form in both tenses, which is expressed by an inflected form of the imperfective auxiliary verb έχω "have" and an invariant verb form derived from the perfective stem of the main verb ...
Dixit te, si id crederes, errare. ("He said that if you believed that, you were wrong.") The unreal present conditional (an imperfect subjunctive in the protasis and the apodosis; an unreal imperfect subjunctive remains unchanged in the protasis; an unreal imperfect subjunctive becomes the infinitive -urum fuisse in the apodosis):
Another use of the subjunctive in modern English is for noun clauses that follow certain types of verbs of command and desire. In this usage the subjunctives convey that the noun clause is describing a state that is a possibility driven by a command or desire, yet not a present reality or future certainty.
In Latin, the sequence of tenses rule affects dependent verbs in the subjunctive mood, mainly in indirect questions, indirect commands, and purpose clauses. [4] If the main verb is in one of the non-past tenses, the subordinate verb is usually in the present or perfect subjunctive (primary sequence); if the main verb is in one of the past tenses, the subordinate verb is usually in the ...