| University of Texas at Austin  | College of Liberal Arts  |   | Linguistics Research Center |


Diebold Center   Links
Scholars' Publications
SITEMAP

A. Richard Diebold Center
for Indo-European Language and Culture

Indo-European Documentation Center

Indo-European Grammar: Mood
end header

PIE Roots
IE Lexicon
PIE Phonemes
Ablaut
Grammar
IE Morphology

Semantics Grammatical Categories Syntax
TYPOLOGY

IE Grammar: Mood

(IN PROGRESS!)

Many problems still remain in the study of Indo-European morphology, particularly when one asks questions about the mapping of universal and typological structures to the changing ways that Indo-European morphological and syntactic forms encode functional categories.

In language generally, the grammatical category MOOD distinguishes functional pragmatic categories related to speaker attitude or intent.

Traditional Indo-Europeapn inflectional mood categories include the INDICATIVE, IMPERATIVE, SUBJUNCTIVE, and OPTATIVE moods.

Mood Forms
Mood Forms Inflectional Mood Categories Grammatical Functions
no suffix + Person/Number Endings Indicative Mood Statement of Fact
no suffix + no ending or PIE *-u Imperative Command, Request
PIE *-e-, dialectal variants Subjunctive Nonfactual, Contrary to fact, Request
PIE *-ye/-i- with dialectal variants Optative Wish, desire; Request
Particles Noninflectional Mood variants
Modal Verbs Noninflectional Modalities

Indicative mood forms give information that the speaker views as true (factual), while with imperatives speakers tell hearers what they want to have accomplished (give commands). In languages that have both inflectional optatives and subjunctives, optatives express a wish ('Long live the king!'), while statements that the speaker views as non-factual or dependent on some condition are marked by the subjunctive mood ('If I were you, ...' as opposed to indicative 'I was you in the play about your life'). In many languages a range of information that the speaker does not intend to state as a fact or intend as an action to be carried out may be marked as subjunctive or optative. Individual language uses are often complex. In addition, Indo-Iranian has a formal "injunctive" mood, an inflectional form characterized by a lack of formal inflectional markers.

As the Indo-European languages differed and changed over time a range of forms came to express functional categories of mood and modality. Not all older languages inflected for all moods, and some languages had inflectional suffixes had additional suffixes such as a DESIDERATIVE (Sanskrit). Other languages use particles instead of or in addition to inflectional endings to express speaker attitudes and intents, while Modern English has developed an entire class of modal verbs (e.g., 'may, could, would') for nuances of nonfactual information.

The history of English modal verbs goes back to the older Germanic class of preterit-present verbs, which in turn reflect a variant set of old verb class endings. English 'could' is the old past tense of 'can' related to older Gothic preterit-present kunnan (kann) 'know' with cognates of 'know' in many other older Indo-European languages that did not have this preterit-present class.

begin footer
Accessibility
Modified:
21 May 2006 CFJ

Comments to Carol F. Justus, Co-ordinator, Indo-European Documentation Center