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When the condition refers to the past, but the consequence to the present, the condition clause is in the past perfect (as with the third conditional), while the main clause is in the conditional mood as in the second conditional (i.e. simple conditional or conditional progressive, but not conditional perfect).
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
The optative mood (/ ˈ ɒ p t ə t ɪ v / OP-tə-tiv or / ɒ p ˈ t eɪ t ɪ v / op-TAY-tiv; [1] abbreviated OPT) is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope regarding a given action.It is a superset of the cohortative mood and is closely related to the subjunctive mood but is distinct from the desiderative mood.
A conditional sentence is a sentence in a natural language that expresses that one thing is contingent on another, e.g., "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the sentence’s main clause is conditional on a subordinate clause.
There is also a past subjunctive (distinct from the simple past only in the possible use of were instead of was), used in some conditional sentences and similar: if I were (or was) rich ...; were he to arrive now ...; I wish she were (or was) here. For details see English subjunctive.
Examples are the English and French conditionals (an analytic construction in English, [c] but inflected verb forms in French), which are morphologically futures-in-the-past, [1] and of which each has thus been referred to as a "so-called conditional" [1] [2] (French: soi-disant conditionnel [3] [4] [5]) in modern and contemporary linguistics ...
Modal expressions come in different categories called flavors.Flavors differ in how the possibilities they discuss relate to reality. For instance, an expression like "might" is said to have epistemic flavor, since it discusses possibilities compatible with some body of knowledge.
Moreover, languages that do use the subjunctive for such conditionals only do so if they have a specific past subjunctive form. Thus, subjunctive marking is neither necessary nor sufficient for membership in this class of conditionals. [12] [13] [9] The terms counterfactual and subjunctive have sometimes been repurposed for more specific uses ...