Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 October 5

= October 5 =

Types of sentences based on grammatical mood
I want to know how many sentences are there in English language based on grammatical moods? Are there four sentences : declarative, question, command and exclamatory? Or are there five sentences: declarative, question, command, optative and exclamatory? --MorningStar123 (talk) 15:54, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
 * "The optative mood is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope. It is similar to the cohortative mood, and is closely related to the subjunctive mood." Essentially what you're asking is:  "Is there any distinction between types of sentences and sentence moods; if so, what?"  That's a matter of semantics, (it seems to me).  2606:A000:1126:28D:68A0:D82D:EF5B:865F (talk) 21:33, 5 October 2019 (UTC) . . . There are four types of sentences and there are seven moods of sentences; they don't directly correlate with each other. [edit:21:58, 5 October 2019 (UTC)]


 * You need to distinguish semantics from morphology -- there could be many different semantic nuances, but as far as verb mood inflections in the traditional sense, English basically only has indicative and imperative (since the historical subjunctive is now split into archaic remnants and very limited special-purpose constructions which do not really add up to a coherent whole). AnonMoos (talk) 09:47, 6 October 2019 (UTC)