How to determine the mood of a verb? This is a fairly simple question, although for many it causes certain difficulties. In fact, everything is much simpler than it seems at first glance.
What is it?
Before going into the rules regarding moods, you need to figure out what it is all about. This is a special grammatical category of the verb, indicating the relationship between action and reality. That is, this is not an independent part of speech, but a form of a verb that shows an action that already exists or is possible in the future.
Types and forms of moods of verbs
In linguistics, the following types of this category are distinguished:
- Indicative.
- The subjunctive.
- Imperative.
- Desired mood (middle between subjunctive and imperative).
- Allowable.
- Prepositional.
- Intentional mood (expressing intent).
- Negative-asking (expressing a request that the action should not be carried out).
- Surreal (typical of Indian and Pacific languages; it characterizes an action that has almost happened).
- Retelling (used in Latvian; exists for translating direct speech into indirect).
The first three of the given moods will be analyzed in more detail, because it is precisely these verbs in the Russian language that are present. However, since there are a lot of all types, in the Russian language each of the available has different characteristics of modality, that is, it combines several inclinations.
Indicative, subjunctive and imperative - features
Indicative mood or indicative - a category that expresses the process at any time. This species does not have a morphological indicator; instead, morphemes of the tense and the verb face are used.
Additional modal characteristics of this subspecies of the category are determination, willingness, threat, and other intonational moments.
Imperative or imperative is the category that is responsible for expressing a request, order, or incitement to act. It is also called an incentive mood. This category has no forms of time, but it is possible to distinguish the forms 2 singular and plural and 1 plural, that is, such a verb is combined with the pronoun "you", "you" and "we", respectively.
Additional modal characteristics of this subspecies of the category are desirability, assumption, obligation, and others.
The subjunctive mood or the subjunctive is a category denoting the desired, suspected or possible process. This species has no forms of time, but it varies in numbers and genera. A feature of this subspecies is the presence of a “would” particle, that is, the question to the verb does not sound “what (s) to do?”, But “what would (s) do?”. Therefore, this inclination is also called conditional.
Other modal characteristics of this given subspecies of the category are desire, advice, regret.
Table with examples
We give examples for each type of mood of verbs in the table.
Indicative (indicative) | Subjunctive (subjunctive) | Imperative (imperative) |
I write / wrote / will write | I would write | no forms |
You write / wrote / will write | no forms | You write! |
He / she writes / wrote / will write | He / she would write | no forms |
We write / wrote / will write | no forms | We're writing! |
You write / wrote / will write | no forms | You write! |
They write / wrote / will write | They would write | no forms |
features - not available | features - no forms of time and persons | features - no forms of time, not all forms of persons |
How to determine the mood of a verb?
Defining the grammar category described is quite difficult. But the table of verb moods that we bring to your attention will help you solve this problem. You need to ask questions from the first column and find the answers in the columns on the right. You can take this as an algorithm that explains how to determine the mood of a verb.
| Indicative | Subjunctive | Imperative |
What does it mean | action that was, is or will be | action that could be | order, request, incitement to action |
What form is used | all forms of face, number, time and gender | only forms of number and gender, always in the past tense | there are no forms of gender, time, only forms of 2 liters. units and many others numbers and 1 l. many number |
Example for clarity | I eat / eat / will eat tonight | He would eat tonight | Eat tonight! |
There is another easy way. To determine the mood of a verb, you first need to ask yourself the question, does the word carry an order or motivation? Thus, the imperative is eliminated. Next, you need to find the particle "would." If it is not, then the subjective will also be removed from the possible options. In general, indicative is the most commonly used among the other subspecies of the category, but sometimes this still does not interfere with verification.
As you can see, the topic of moods in Russian is far from the simplest, but not the most difficult. In order to correctly determine whether a glaul belongs to this category, you just need to understand what meaning it carries and pay attention to the words surrounding the verb. Often this is what helps to draw the right conclusions.