OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
Open search box
I’m lying.
Lie to me.
Do I lie?
I wish I were lying.
If I couldn’t tell the truth, I would lie.
You probably already know that when we speak or write, we have a set of options for how to express time. These are called tenses – present (present continuous or progressive), past (past perfect, future (future perfect). All of these tenses help us explain where the time of the text is in relationship to the things that the text itself is describing. Tenses provide accuracy and also flavor for our writing.
But now take a closer look at the sentences that opened this video. I’m lying. Lie to me. Do I lie? I wish I were lying. If I couldn’t tell the truth, I would lie. Like sentences with different tenses, each of these sentences express a different relationship between the text and the things it’s describing.
But take a look at the tenses of the verb “to lie” in each of these sentences. That’s right, even though it might not at first seem or feel like it, they’re all in the present tense. In this case, the verbs differ not in tense but in mood. If tense indicates the relationship of a text to its time relative the moment that the audience reads it, then mood indicates the relationship of the text to a set of possible worlds, or states of mind, relative to the “reality” of the text around it.
So, when we talk about “mood” in grammar, we’re talking about what that relationship, and we’re also talking about how we indicate it using the words or sentence structures we have in our language. Many languages, for instance, change something about the verb in order to indicate what mood a sentence is: maybe a vowel change or adding an ending. Others reorganize the syntax (that is, the word order) of phrases within the sentence, to indicate changes in mood. Because English is a hodgepodge of different languages, English does both.
So, let’s look at some examples:
In the declarative mood, we’re in real space. This is the space of what’s actually happening in the text. Usually, but not always, in English, we use subject-plus-verb order in the declarative mood. For instance, “I’m lying.”
Imperative mood is a mood that commands. It articulates what we’d like someone else to make happen. “Lie to me.” Here we have a verb in the first position, the subject of the sentence is understood, and we might, though we don’t need to, use an exclamation point.
Interrogative mood asks a question. It expresses uncertainty about what’s happening or has happened, or is trying to get information. “Did I lie?” This question uses a dummy operator or auxiliary (the word “did”), as well as having question mark. But some sentences in the interrogative mood can use question words like “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “how,” and “why.”
Subjunctive mood expresses desire. It presents a contrary-to-fact situation; you might even think of the subjunctive mood as a tiny bit of fantasy that you can throw into your sentences, like “I wish I were lying.” Here we have the phrase “I wish” (or we could also use “if only” or “would that”) plus the subject, “I,” plus the verb “were,” though the verb “were” to express subjunctive is now kind of archaic, and we might see people use the word “was” or “could” instead.
The exclamative or exclamatory mood expresses a strong emotion. This one starts out like a question, with a question word, and an object-plus-subject-plus-verb order, and ends in an exclamation point. “How well I’m lying!” or “What a lie I’m telling!”
And finally, the conditional mood. This sets up if/then statements. Here, the occurrence of the second part of the sentence depends upon the first part becoming a reality. “If I couldn’t tell the truth, I would lie.”
With the exception of the declarative, each of these moods presents counterfactual spaces in the world or in the mind: things that the speakers wishes might happen, tries to make happen, or thinks. It might seem tricky, but with a little bit of practice you can use each of these moods to express nuance and subtlety into your writing. Try it with different verbs, like “eat,” “sleep,” “somersault” and leave a comment about your results! That sentence, by the way, is in the imperative mood. What sort of stories can you create using only the subjunctive? That sentence was in the interrogative. I wish I could read them! That one was subjunctive.