How to determine the mood of a verb? This is a fairly simple question, although it causes some difficulties for many. In fact, everything is much simpler than it seems at first glance.
What is this?
Before we get into the rules about inclinations, we need to understand what they are. This is a special grammatical category of the verb, indicating the connection 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.
- Subjunctive.
- Imperative.
- Desired mood (middle between subjunctive and imperative).
- Permissible.
- Propositional.
- Intentional mood (expressing intention).
- Negative-interrogative (expression of a request that the action not be carried out).
- Surreal (characteristic of Indian and Pacific languages; it characterizes an action that has almost happened).
- Descriptive (used inLatvian; exists to translate direct speech into indirect).
The first three of the given moods will be analyzed in more detail, because they are the verbs in Russian. However, since there are a whole lot of types, in the Russian language each of the available ones has different characteristics of modality, that is, it combines several moods.
Indicative, subjunctive and imperative – features
The indicative or indicative is a category that expresses a process at any time. This type does not have a morphological indicator; instead, morphemes of tense and person of the verb are used.
Additional modal characteristics of this subspecies of the category are determination, readiness, threat and other intonational moments.
Imperative or imperative - a category responsible for expressing a request, order or inducement to action. It is also called the incentive mood. This category has no tense forms, but it is possible to distinguish the forms of 2 persons singular and plural and 1 person 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 - desirability, assumption, obligation and others.
Subjunctive mood or subjunctive - a category denoting the desired,proposed or possible process. This species has no forms of time, but it changes in numbers and genders. A feature of this subspecies is the presence of the particle "would", that is, the question for the verb does not sound "what (c) to do?", but "what to (c) do?". Therefore, this mood is also called conditional.
Other modal characteristics of this given subspecies of the category are desire, advice, regret.
Table with examples
Let's give examples for each type of verb mood in the table.
| Indicative (indicative) | Subjunctive (subjunctive) | Imperative (imperative) |
| I'm writing/wrote/will be writing | I would write | no forms |
| You write / wrote / will write | no forms | You write! |
| He/she is/was/will be writing | He/she would write | no forms |
| We are writing/were writing/will be writing | no forms | We are writing! |
| You are/have been/will be writing | no forms | You write! |
| They are/have been writing/will be writing | They would have written | no forms |
| features - none | features - no forms of time and faces | features - no time forms, not all face shapes |
How to determine the mood of a verb?
It can be quite difficult to determine the grammatical category being described. But the table of moods of verbs, which 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 think of 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 have been | order, request, call to action |
| In what form is used | all forms of person, number, tense and gender | only number and gender forms, always in the past tense | no forms of gender, time, only forms of 2 l. units and many others. numbers and 1 l. pl. number |
| Example for clarity | I eat/have eaten/will eat tonight | He would eat tonight | Eat tonight! |
There is another easy way. To determine the mood of a verb, you must first ask yourself the question, does the word carry a command or an impulse? Thus, the imperative is eliminated. Next, you need to find the particle "would". If it doesn't exist, thenthe subjunctive will also be removed from the possible options. In general, the indicative mood is the most commonly used among the other subtypes of the category, but sometimes it still doesn’t hurt to check.
As you can see, the subject of moods in Russian is far from the simplest, but not the most difficult either. In order to correctly determine whether a glalol 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.
