Let's see if we can shed some light on what it means to talk about the mood of
the verb. Now, mood is one of four kinds of indicators or aspects of the verb --
ways in which we can talk about the verb. The other three are tense (tense
tells you about when something happens -- so present, past, or future), and we also
have aspect (that tells you a little bit about the duration over time or the way
the action extends over time -- if it was finished or continued, or something like
that), and then the last one is voice (and that tells you if the action is active
or passive). Now mood is a little bit different from these, because what mood
tells you about is the speaker's attitude towards what's being described.
So the attitude. Let's see if we can make some sense of this. We'll start
with the indicative. So we have three moods here in English. We have the
imperative, the indicative, and the subjunctive. The indicative is all
about being fairly sure or confident in what you are describing, and that's why a
lot of the time with the indicative you're describing facts. So an example
would be something like "he kicks the ball." I can see that he kicks the ball. I
don't know why I always use "kick" as the example in grammar videos, but "he kicks
the ball" -- this is a fact and I can observe it. So a lot of times the
indicative is being used for things that you can describe, that you can see, that
that are going on, that are true. You don't have to
physically see them, but they are true in in the larger world out there.
The other thing that you can use the indicative for is for questions, so you
can ask questions with the indicative as well. You could say something like
"did he pay?" and here we have a helping verb ("did") and we have the regular verb
and the question mark, and we say "did he pay?" So that's also the indicative. Then
we have the imperative, and the imperative is all about commanding
people to do things. In fact, I would say that the imperative is the easiest one
to remember. It's fairly straightforward. You just gotta request something or
command something. You could say something like "pass the ball."
Let's say you're playing a sport, you say "pass the ball" ... exclamation mark! And then
"pass" is the verb and "pass" is in the imperative mood. So if we go back to our
sense of attitude then ... if the indicative is about being confident that something
is a fact (even in a question you're still expressing in the same way)
then the imperative is about desiring something. It's about desire, it's about
wanting something, and it's about demanding. That's your attitude
towards the action. Then the last one is the subjunctive, and this one is the
hardest. It's hard to describe the mood here. I suppose what we could say is
that the mood is a little bit more speculative. Maybe that's a good word for
it, because what the subjunctive typically refers to is actions or states
of being (when it comes to the verb) that are more hypothetical. These are often
more hypothetical, and they may in fact be conditions contrary to fact ...
or at least not known to be fact. We don't know yet if these are
facts. So the subjunctive then is a more kind of hypothetical type of mood.
Let's zoom into this a little bit more and give you a couple of examples. We
really should treat the subjunctive separately in a video by itself, and I'm
sure we'll do it do that at some point, because it is really quite tricky. So as
I mentioned -- did I mention this? No I didn't mention this! The subjunctive is
often being replaced by modal auxiliaries, so replaced in English often
by modals. A couple of examples would be "should" or "could." You
can see in there already that sense of the hypothetical.
You "should" do this -- it's not necessarily something you are doing.
It's not indicative. You're not describing something that's happening,
but it's a more hypothetical, contrary to fact kind of action. You "should" do this,
and you "might" do this, and you "may" do this. These are also more
subjunctive hypothetical states. Let me give you a couple of examples then of
where you can actually see this in practice. The first one here is with "I."
Let's say you say "if I were sick ..." and you can finish this. You could say
"I would binge watch TV all day," or something like that. But if you start
with "I" (if I were sick) then "were" is the subjunctive. It's not "was." "Was" would be
indicative. But it's "were." It's a hypothetical statement. If this were the
case. And that's where sometimes people are not familiar with this. They make
this mistake, whereas native speakers tend to know intuitively that they're
supposed to use "were." But the reason is because "were" is the subjunctive. Here's
another example and this one you may not be familiar with. So let's say you write
or you say "I suggested that he heed my advice." ...
You can see here that "heed" is not "heeds." If this was the indicative you
would say "he heeds." But "heed" here is the subjunctive, and it's missing that s.
That's how you can tell, and that's because this second clause ("that he heed my
advice") -- this is not actually fact but it's something that I'm suggesting. It's
a condition contrary to fact. It's a hypothetical situation. And it may or may
not happen. To summarize then, what we have is we
have three moods: the imperative, the indicative, and the subjunctive. The
indicative and the imperative are very common, and the subjunctive is
increasingly rare. You could actually ignore it to a certain extent, but
you will see it still show up in certain instances,
and also in these old expressions that are still with us. So we'll finish
with one example here. Let's say you say "God help us" ... This is the
subjunctive because in the indicative it would be "God helps us," but this is more
of a hypothetical contrary to fact statement. It's a statement about what we
would like to happen. That's it for the mood of the verb.