Realis moods
Encyclopedia
Realis moods are a category of grammatical mood
s which indicate that something is actually the case (or actually not the case); in other words, the state of which is known. The most common realis mood is the indicative mood, or declarative mood.
In contrast, Irrealis mood are grammatical moods that indicate a statement is untrue or unknown.
has no means of morphologically
distinguishing generic mood from indicative mood; however, the distinction can easily be understood in context by surrounding words. Compare, for example: rabbits are fast, versus, those rabbits are fast. Use of the demonstrative pronoun those implies specific, particular rabbits, whereas omitting it implies the generic mood simply by default.
Ancient Greek
had a kind of generic mood, the so-called gnomic tense, marked by the aorist
indicative (normally reserved for statements about the past). It was used especially to express philosophical truths about the world.
.
and various other Semitic languages
, the energetic mood expresses something which is strongly believed or which the speaker wishes to emphasize, e.g. yaktubanna يَكتُبَنَّ ("he certainly writes").
Grammatical mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...
s which indicate that something is actually the case (or actually not the case); in other words, the state of which is known. The most common realis mood is the indicative mood, or declarative mood.
In contrast, Irrealis mood are grammatical moods that indicate a statement is untrue or unknown.
Indicative
The indicative mood or evidential mood (abbreviated ) is used for factual statements and positive beliefs, for example, "Paul is eating an apple." or "John eats apples." All intentions that a particular language does not categorize as another mood are classified as indicative. It is the most commonly used mood and is found in all languages.Modern English
The indicative mood is for statements of actuality or strong probability:- The spine-tailed swift flies faster than any other bird in the world.
- The Missouri and Mississippi Rivers rose to record heights in 1993.
- Midwesterners will remember the flooding for many years to come.
- One may use "do", "does", or "did" with the indicative for emphasis.
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- Indicative Mood
| Present indicative: | Jerry laughs on television. |
| Past indicative: | Jerry laughed on television. |
| Future indicative: | Jerry will laugh on television tomorrow. |
Generic
The generic mood is used to generalize about a particular class of things, e.g. in "Rabbits are fast", one is speaking about rabbits in general, rather than about particular fast rabbits. EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
has no means of morphologically
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
distinguishing generic mood from indicative mood; however, the distinction can easily be understood in context by surrounding words. Compare, for example: rabbits are fast, versus, those rabbits are fast. Use of the demonstrative pronoun those implies specific, particular rabbits, whereas omitting it implies the generic mood simply by default.
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
had a kind of generic mood, the so-called gnomic tense, marked by the aorist
Aorist
Aorist is a philological term originally from Indo-European studies, referring to verb forms of various languages that are not necessarily related or similar in meaning...
indicative (normally reserved for statements about the past). It was used especially to express philosophical truths about the world.
Declarative
The declarative mood (abbreviated ) indicates that the statement is true, without any qualifications being made. It is in many languages equivalent to the indicative mood, although sometimes distinctions between them are drawn. It is closely related with the inferential moodInferential mood
The inferential mood is used to report a nonwitnessed event without confirming it, but the same forms also function as admiratives in the Balkan languages in which they occur. The inferential mood is used in some languages such as Turkish to convey information about events, which were not directly...
.
Energetic
Found in Classical ArabicClassical Arabic
Classical Arabic , also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times . It is based on the Medieval dialects of Arab tribes...
and various other Semitic languages
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
, the energetic mood expresses something which is strongly believed or which the speaker wishes to emphasize, e.g. yaktubanna يَكتُبَنَّ ("he certainly writes").