The Category of Mood

Mood is a grammatical category which expresses the speaker's attitude toward the process, indicating whether it is regarded as a fact or as a non-fact, i.e. as a matter of supposition, desire, possibility, etc. Hence two moods — fact and non-fact.

Presenting facts, the speaker may be categoric and non-categoric:

John's health is bad. vs. John's health must be bad.

Facts are expressed by the indicative mood and non-facts by the subjunctive mood. Cf. I go to university, vs. He suggests 1 (should) go to university. I am a student again, vs. I wish I were a student again.

What about the imperative mood? Is it a fact or a non-fact mood?

Traditionally, this mood is called a separate mood. M. Blokh argues that the imperative is a variety of the mood of attitudes, i.e. the subjunctive. To prove this, he says that "the imperative form displays every property of a form of attitudes, which can easily be shown by means of equivalent transformations" (op. cit, 189). Consider his examples: Be off! —> I demand that you (should) be off; Do be careful with the papers. —* My request is that you (should) be careful with the papers; Do as I ask you! —> I insist that you (should) do as I ask you.

As can be seen, the meaning of the imperative does not much differ from the meaning of the subjunctive. Thus if we agree with M. Blokh, we shall have only two moods - the indicative and the non-indicative.

Speaking of the non-fact i.e. the subjunctive mood, linguists distinguish various semantic varieties of the mood: subjunctive I, subjunctive II, conditional, suppositional. These moods are distinguished on the basis of meaning which is dependent on the linguistic distribution of the forms, i.e. they are 'modal' varieties of the subjunctive mood.

The fact, or the indicative mood, is expressed by the indicative mood forms. Its modalized variety is expressed by the use of appropriate modal verbs. The imperative variety of the non-fact mood is marked by the use of the bare (i.e. unmarked) infinitive. The subjunctive variety of the non-fact mood is more complicated. The only regular inflections by which the subjunctive is distinguished from the indicative are the forms of the old subjunctive:

1. the first form of the verb (i.e. the bare infinitive);

2. the form were.

Mary suggests I go to university.

My wife wishes she were a student again.

The present subjunctive is not common in British English: it is generally restricted to elevated prose, poetry and official documents. In American English, it is used in both spoken and written English. The past subjunctive form were is being replaced by the form was in spoken English.

If I was an architect, I'd re-design this house.

This would still be true if Britain luas out of the Community.

Sometimes, however, both forms can be found in the same text:

My wife says she wishes I were a thousand miles away, and I wish I was.

Were is replaced here by was for the sake of emphasis: was, being more pragmatical phonologically, is more suitable for this purpose than were.

A notable characteristic of English is that there is not a single verb form which could be unambiguously labeled as subjunctive. Though a form may express a non-fact meaning, it always happens to look like an indicative form. It means that one and the same form can be used to express both facts and non-facts, e.g.

If only I had more time vs. I had more time when I was younger.

If only I had had more time vs. He said he had had more time then. The question that linguists have been trying to answer is: are the forms used in the subordinate clauses the same as those used in the past indicative? In other words, can we speak of the homonymy of the subjunctive forms with the indicative forms? According to J.B. Khlebnikova (1965), "homonyms are only those homographs that belong to different microsystems and therefore express diametrically opposed grammatical features. For example: were in we were there and if we were there, are different. They may be considered homonyms because they express, in certain distributions, incompatible grammatical features of reality - unreality.

However, past forms can also be viewed as polysemous, i.e. related semantically. The meaning that underlies both past forms is the meaning of distance. Something that occurred in the past can be treated as distant from the speaker's current situation. In the case of the subjunctive, the past form marks a process presented by the speaker as not being close to present reality. The past form, then, could be called the remote or distant form which can be used to communicate not only distance from the moment of speaking, but also distance from current reality (George Yule, 1996:15). Depending on the context, the meaning, which is an inherent feature of a past form, may denote reality or unreality.

Apart from the synthetic 'subjunctive' forms, English possesses analytic 'subjunctive' forms composed of shall/should, will/would, may/might, can/could and the base form of a verb, e.g. Make a note of it so that you shan't forget. Make a note of it lest you should forget. They have arrived early so that they won't miss the overture. Similar problems concern should or would constructions: they may be treated as a case of homonymy or polysemy. To quote B. Ilyish (op. cit, 108), "If we have decided to avoid homonymy as far as possible, we will say that a group of this type is basically a tense (the future in the past), which under certain specified conditions may express an unreal action - the consequence of an unfulfilled condition." The scholar, however, does not give any solution of the problem.

To sum up, the category of mood is represented by two oppositions: the indicative mood and the suppositional mood. The indicative mood is the basic mood of the verb. Morphologically it has the most developed system. Semantically, it is the fact mood; it is the least subjective of all the moods. The suppositional mood, which includes the traditional imperative and the subjunctive mood and represents the process as a non-fact, i.e. as something imaginary, desirable, problematic, contrary to reality. The imperative variety of this mood is morphologically the least developed: it is only expressed by the bare infinitive form. The subjunctive variety of this mood uses one of two types of construction:

1. non-modal: a) the base form of a verb; b) were; c) forms identical with indicative mood forms;

2. modal (modal verb + the base form of a verb).