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.
If the present subjunctive is the same as the present indicative, which can often happen other than in the third person-singular, whose the regular indicative ending is a -t, the second subjunctive, also known as irrealis, Konjunktiv II, or traditionally as the imperfect subjunctive, is used.
The term subjunctive conditional has been used as a replacement, though it is also acknowledged as a misnomer. Many languages do not have a subjunctive (e.g., Danish and Dutch ), and many that do have it don’t use it for this sort of conditional (e.g., French , Swahili , all Indo-Aryan languages that have a subjunctive).
It is a form of the perfect construction, using a form of the auxiliary haben or sein (depending on the main verb) together with the past participle of the main verb. The auxiliary in this case takes past subjunctive form: hätte/st/t/n (in the case of haben) or wäre/st/t/n (in the case of sein). [9] Ich hätte gesungen ("I had [subjunctive ...
The use of tense and aspectual forms in condition and conditional clauses follows special patterns; see conditional mood. For use of tenses in indirect speech, see sequence of tenses. For the use of subjunctive forms, see English subjunctive.
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 ...