Conditional mood  

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The conditional mood is a grammatical mood used in conditional sentences to express a proposition whose validity is dependent on some condition, possibly counterfactual.

It may refer to a distinct verb form that expresses the conditional set of circumstances proper in the dependent clause or protasis (e.g. in Turkish or AzerbaijaniTemplate:Efn), or which expresses the hypothetical state of affairs or uncertain event contingent to it in the independent clause or apodosis, or both (e.g. in Hungarian or FinnishTemplate:Efn). Some languages distinguish more than one conditional mood; the East African language Hadza, for example, has a potential conditional expressing possibility, and a veridical conditional expressing certainty. Other languages Template:Which? do not have a conditional mood at all Template:Citation needed. In some informal contexts, such as language teaching, it may be called the "conditional tense".

Some languages have verb forms called "conditional" although their use is not exclusive to conditional expression. Examples are the English or French conditionals (an analytic construction in English,Template:Efn but inflected verb forms in French), which are morphologically futures-in-the-past,) in modern and contemporary linguistics (e.g. French Template:Lang, from Late Latin Template:Lang, in Template:Lang, "if you allowed me to do so, I would sing" [so-called conditional] vs. Template:Lang, "I said that I would sing" [future-in-the-past]). The English would construction may also be used for past habitual action ("When I was young I would happily walk three miles to school every day").

This article describes the formation of the conditional forms of verbs in certain languages. For fuller details of the construction of conditional sentences, see Conditional sentence (and for English specifically, English conditional sentences).




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Conditional mood" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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