Grammar for Everyone - Barbara Dykes 2007

23 Mood - Indicative mood
Introduction
Part II The parts of speech

Definition: The word ’mood’ comes from Latin modus and refers to the mode or manner in which an action is expressed.

Before studying mood, students should know about:

• the different kinds of sentences

• verb tenses for all kinds of statement apart from the conditional

• auxiliary verb forms

Many people have no idea what mood means and believe that it is an obscure, perhaps old-fashioned grammar term. In reality mood is a verb form, which, as the term implies, describes the mode or manner in which an action is spoken about, and it affects every sentence we utter.

In English there are just three moods. The first two, indicative and imperative, we have been practising from the beginning. The third, subjunctive is the worry as it is misunderstood and therefore confused, though in reality, it is straightforward and lends clarity and subtlety to our language.

The subjunctive mood causes confusion for several reasons, the first being the decline in grammar instruction in recent decades. The second is the process of attrition by which some finer points of language get lost over centuries. Thirdly, the remaining forms in some cases duplicate the indicative forms, so those subjunctive ones get overlooked or deemed unnecessary. But they are still with us and, without being pedantic, we owe it to our students and future generations to provide them with correct and empowering information about their own language. Colloquial speech does, by definition, shy away from fastidiousness, but students should have the opportunity to learn the correct forms and use them in formal speech and writing.

Indicative mood

From Latin indicativus meaning ’stating’, the indicative refers simply to statements such as those that form most of our speech and which we have studied earlier.

For example:

I like bananas.