Grammatical modality
In general, modality refers to an abstract concept, whereas mood is the ways in which the concept is marked in a particular language. Many languages will mark some modalities with particular word endings, etc., but will leave other means for marking other modalities (e.g. phrases). Languages differ in how fine distinctions of mood they make. No language would provide markings for all the moods below, although they are all expressible in any language using sufficient phraseology.
Deontic moods include the commissive, directive and volitive moods.
Indicate promises or threats.
Indicate requests, commands, instructions, etc.
- Precative mood: signifies requests, e.g. Could you pass me the salt?
- Deliberative mood: asks whether something should be done, e.g. Should we go to the market?
- Imperative mood: expressing commands, e.g. Pass me the salt!
- Immediate imperative mood: commands that should be implemented immediately, e.g. Pass me the salt right now!
- Jussive mood: indicates commands, permission or agreement with a request
- Permissive mood: indicates that the action is permited, e.g. You may come inside.
- Prohibitive mood: indicates that the action of the verb is not permitted, e.g. You can't come in!
Indicate desires, wishes or fears.
- Imprecative mood: indicates a desire for an threatening event to occur, e.g. May he lose the race.
- Optative mood: indicates wishing or hoping for an event to occur, e.g. I hope I win the race.
Indicate the epistemic probability of an uterrance being true. Some epistemic moods:
- Quotative evidental mood: indicates that the utterance is based on someone elses say so, e.g. I've heard she can be a real bitch sometimes.
- Sensory evidental mood: indicates the utterance is based on what the speaker has seen/heard with their own eyes/ears. Sometimes, sensory evidental moods are distinguished based on what sense this sensory experience was from, e.g. sight v.s. hearing
- Assumptive mood: indicates that the statement is assumed to be true, because it usually is, although there may not be any specific evidence that it is true because in this particular case
- Declarative mood: indicates that the statement is true, without any qualifications being made
- Deductive mood: indicates that the truth of the statement was deduced from other information, rather than being directly known. For example, There's gas in the house! Someone must have left the stove on! (deductive indicated by must)
- Dubitative mood: indicates that the statement is dubious, doubtful, or uncertain
- Hypothetical mood: the statement, while not actually true, could have been true - e.g. You could have killed him.
- Interrogative mood: the statement is a question, Did you do that?
- Speculative mood: based on the available information, the statement might be true but that is admittedly a speculation
Some other moods
- Alethic moods: indicate the logical necessity, possibility or impossibility of the state of affairs. For example,
in "A circle can't be square", "can't be" is an alethic mood, whereas "He can't be that wealthy", "can't be" is not an alethic mood.
- Realis moods: indicates something is actually the case, most commonly the indicative/declarative mood
- Irrealis moods: indicates that something is not the case
- Subjunctive mood: a mood found in some languages (e.g. many European languages), which conflates together
notions of counterfactualness, hypotheticality, the optative mood, etc. It groups together irrealis modalities which are distinguished as separate moods in some other languages.
This should probably be merged with Grammatical mood