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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 ...
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.
(Spanish: "Si yo fuera/fuese rico, compraría una casa.") [66] The perfect past subjunctive (the imperfect subjunctive of haber and then a past participle) refers to an unfulfilled condition in the past, and the other clause would be in the perfect conditional: "Si yo hubiera/hubiese tenido dinero, habría comprado la casa" ("If I had been rich ...
The choice between present subjunctive and imperfect subjunctive is determined by the tense of the main verb of the sentence. The future subjunctive is rarely used in modern Spanish and mostly appears in old texts, legal documents, and certain fixed expressions, such as venga lo que viniere ("come what may").
Today, the two forms of the imperfect subjunctive – for example, "hubiese" and "hubiera", from "haber" – are largely interchangeable.* The -se form derives (as in most Romance languages) from the Latin pluperfect subjunctive, while the -ra form derives from the Latin pluperfect indicative. The use of one or the other is largely a matter of ...
In the following sentence, instead of a pluperfect subjunctive, the imperfect subjunctive restituerētur is used with a prospective or future meaning: [166] nec, sī illa restituerētur, dubitāvī quīn mē sēcum redūceret (Cicero) [167] 'and I didn't doubt that, if the republican government were restored, it would bring me back with it'
A present general condition uses the same grammatical construction (ἐάν with the subjunctive) as a vivid future condition, but is much less common. The present subjunctive is used when the actions of the two clauses are contemporaneous: γελᾷ ὁ μῶρος, κἄν τι μὴ γελοῖον ᾖ. (Menander) [34]