Talk:Irrealis mood

Renarrative, Inferrential, Admirative, Mediative or Oblique???
Hi,

I want to make a separete article for this mood as it is getting quite long and unruly here. However, i do not know what to call the page - one of the abovementioned names; all of them; which one?

Please hold the discussion on the Gram Mood talk page. BigSteve (talk) 08:33, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * feel free to add them —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.255.211.104 (talk) 21:12, 24 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Separate is spelled separate. --Marshall "Unfree" Price 208.54.85.210 (talk) 00:01, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Is the present subjunctive (of German and Icelandic) distinct from the inferential mood
German's present subjunctive as in er sei tot "he is [said to be] dead" opposed to er ist tot "he is dead" seems indistinct from the inferential or renarrative mood described in the article. Are they the same mood? Icelandic has an identical mood. macjacobus (talk) 04:13, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

German: “er gilt als tot“ (He is said to be dead). Otherwise, “er sei tot“ should translated into “he be dead“ because of indirect knowledge of his potential dead. Iralwynn (talk) 13:04, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Not Imperative
I don't think that "Let's go." is an imperative. It's a hortative. The main article on hortatives identifies it as such. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.179.92.117 (talk) 02:19, 16 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Hundreds of millions of Americans now living have been taught to believe it's imperative. It's probably hortative, too, depending on the grammar you conceive. It might also be whatever the word is for the Latin mood for warnings, "moneo", or something like that, since it's something one might say when danger approaches. --Marshall "Unfree" Price 172.56.27.219 (talk) 00:07, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

‘let‘ < imperative, thus let us go is an imperative. Iralwynn (talk) 13:06, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Hortatives in English
This article states that there are no hortatives in English, but the main article on hortatives cites numerous examples from English. 70.179.92.117 (talk) 02:24, 16 March 2011 (UTC)


 * I think this illustrates a blind spot in English grammar. We use our language to exhort people to do things, but English doesn't bother with subtleties which some other languages go to great lengths to express explicitly. "Hortative" was a word that never cropped up in my many years of studying English, though the meaning of the word is obvious; I never thought of it as a grammatical concept, in any language. I've never even encountered "mood" before, except in languages other than English. --Marshall "Unfree" Price 208.54.85.250 (talk) 00:21, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

In English, too, the would + infinitive construct can be employed in main clauses, with a subjunctive sense: "If you would only tell me what is troubling you, I might be able to help".
"In English, too, the would + infinitive construct can be employed in main clauses, with a subjunctive sense: "If you would only tell me what is troubling you, I might be able to help"."

Wrong. Not main, but subordinate. Yes? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Constantinehuk (talk • contribs) 00:04, 25 September 2012 (UTC)


 * The infinitive form of "tell" is "to tell". If the "to" is missing, I don't know what to call it, but infinitive isn't right. Some people, I think, refer to it as the "dictionary", "root", or "stem" form. --Marshall "Unfree" Price 172.56.27.193 (talk) 00:28, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Infintives aren't obligatorily with a ‘to‘, that is just a misconception of a lot of English linguists. The English language is better studied by foreigners than Englishmen themselves. Iralwynn (talk) 13:07, 12 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Can I ask what your native language is? Does this article (or other articles) make false claims about it? Botterweg14 (talk) 15:10, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

English examples in the table
keeps changing the English examples for the desiderative and dubitative moods in the table. Both and I believe that their examples are ungrammatical and have reversed their edits, but they keep changing it back. Could we have a third party chime in? Zhen Zhen (talk) 01:06, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
 * To be honest, I'm not sure there should even be English examples in the table. None of these moods are morphological in English, and most of them don't even correspond to particular clause types. Any objections to me just removing that part of the table? Botterweg14 (talk) 14:36, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think morphology of verbs or strict correspondance with clause types is the only point. For an article in English, it makes sense to express in English what the mood is expressing. Also, many of the English examples highlight English styles that are not common for other moods. I would not want to see the English examples in the table removed.--Backfromquadrangle (talk) 02:04, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Contemplative is missing?
We may be missing contemplative mood, either entirely or by failing to equate it with another term that is more often used for the same thing. It occurs in Tagalog. We're redlinking it at Interlinear gloss, possibly some other places. Tagalog grammar seems to suggest this is an aspect rather than a mood. This is outside the kind of linguistics I studied at university in any detail, so I'll leave it to others to sort out what to do with this. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:07, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * In most descriptions of Tagalog, this is treated as an aspect, e.g. by De Guzman (1978), who characterizes is by the feature [-begun]. It's not a future tense, because it can also describe intended/anticipated events in the past ("when I was about to leave the house"). So it's more or less identical to what we have listed here in WP as prospective aspect. –Austronesier (talk) 17:23, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Good to know. Should this be cross-referenced in some way? I.e., if someone runs across this called "contemplateive mood", they may try to look it up here, and should get to the right place.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:26, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Irrealis "moods" in Japanese and Chinese
There is a thin (and fuzzy) line between a grammatical mood, generally defined as morphological/inflectional marking on a verb, and other ways to express that same mood. I've added some obvious oversights about Japanese irrealis moods, notably the Hortative (which is one of the five basic conjugations of a Japanese verb). But Japanese has plenty of ways to express many of these moods through verb conjugations. E.g., are the different inflectional structures to express necessity (-nakereba naranai, -nakute naranai) examples of a necessitative mood?

Further, I think it's a shame that the various dialects of Chinese are not represented on this page. Yes, Chinese is a prototypical analytic language, but there are certain adverbs that are ubiquitous markers of mood. I'm thinking specifically of 竟然 (jingran) and 居然 (juran), which respectively express relatively neutral surprise and strongly negative surprise. Unsurprisingly, they don't carry meaningful semantic content and don't translate well. I'd consider these examples of a mirative mood, though I've never seen them described this way in descriptive grammars of Chinese. At least for the lay reader, the fact that Mandarin specifically can unambiguously encode this mood should be of interest, even if linguists may quibble, and hence I decided to include it. Yukuefumei (talk) 17:36, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

Why are examples of languages with interrogative mood limited to Welsh and Nenets?
It seems like many languages have the interrogative mood. For example, isn´t this English sentence in the interrogative mood?

I'm asking earnestly because I don't have the expertise to say. But seeing the table limited to Welsh and Nenets makes me think that this is a relatively uncommon mood, like the eventive mood and Finnish. It makes me doubt that I know what the interrogative mood is. I'm all for highlighting some languages with less speakers, but couldn't this row have a few more example languages (or even Language families)? GottaBeAName (talk) 16:10, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Transcription error
toy otishal= toi otişăl Athanasius V (talk) 10:39, 10 April 2024 (UTC)