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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 ...
Subjunctive clauses most commonly appear as clausal complements of non-veridical operators. The most common use of the English subjunctive is the mandative or jussive subjunctive, [10] which is optionally used in the clausal complements of some predicates whose meanings involve obligation. [11] (5) Mandative subjunctive: a. I insist that he ...
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.
The earliest use of the word clause in Middle English is non-technical and similar to the current everyday meaning of phrase: "A sentence or clause, a brief statement, a short passage, a short text or quotation; in a ~, briefly, in short; (b) a written message or letter; a story; a long passage in an author's source."
In the Latin language, the present subjunctive has a usage labelled the "jussive subjunctive" or coniunctivus iussivus that expresses 3rd-person orders: [4] [5] Adiuvet ("Let him help.") Veniant ("Let them come.") A jussive use of the present subjunctive is also attested for the second person in sayings and poetry, as well as in early Latin. [6]
The subjunctive mood, sometimes called conjunctive mood, has several uses in dependent clauses. Examples include discussing hypothetical or unlikely events, expressing opinions or emotions, or making polite requests (the exact scope is language-specific).
A typical English verb may have five different inflected forms: . The base form or plain form (go, write, climb), which has several uses—as an infinitive, imperative, present subjunctive, and present indicative except in the third-person singular
Subjunctive possibility (also called alethic possibility) is a form of modality studied in modal logic.Subjunctive possibilities are the sorts of possibilities considered when conceiving counterfactual situations; subjunctive modalities are modalities that bear on whether a statement might have been or could be true—such as might, could, must, possibly, necessarily, contingently, essentially ...