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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.
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 ...
An example of the difference between indicative and counterfactual conditionals is the following English minimal pair: Indicative conditional : If Sally owns a donkey, then she rides it. Simple past counterfactual : If Sally owned a donkey, she would ride it.
For example, the subjunctive and optative moods in Ancient Greek alternate syntactically in many subordinate clauses, depending on the tense of the main verb. The usage of the indicative, subjunctive, and jussive moods in Classical Arabic is almost completely controlled by syntactic context.
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 subjunctive mood exists in English, but it often is not obligatory.
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.
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 ...