Realis mood

Realis moods (abbreviated real) are a category of grammatical moods which indicate that something is actually the case (or actually not the case); in other words, the state of which is known. The most common realis mood is the indicative mood, or declarative mood.

In contrast, Irrealis mood are grammatical moods that indicate a statement is untrue or unknown.

Indicative

The indicative mood or evidential mood (abbreviated ind) is used for factual statements and positive beliefs, for example, "Paul is eating an apple." or "John eats apples." All intentions that a particular language does not categorize as another mood are classified as indicative. It is the most commonly used mood and is found in all languages.^{[citation needed]}

English indicative

History

The indicative suffixes in Old, Middle, and Modern English regular verbs^[1]

	Present tense				Past tense
	Singular			Plural	Singular		Plural
	First person	Second person	Third person		First & third person	Second person
Old English	-e	-st	-eþ	-aþ	-d-e	-d-est	-d-on
Middle English	-e, -∅	-st	-th, -s	-e(n)	-d(e)	-d-st	-d-e(n)
Early Modern English	-∅	-st	-s, -th	-∅	-d	-d-st	-d
Modern English	-∅	-∅	-s	-∅	-d	-d	-d

Modern English

The indicative mood is for statements of actuality or strong probability:

• The spine-tailed swift flies faster than any other bird in the world.
• The Missouri and Mississippi Rivers rose to record heights in 1993.
• Midwesterners will remember the flooding for many years to come.
• One may use "do", "does", or "did" with the indicative for emphasis.

Indicative Mood

Present indicative:	Jerry laughs on television.
Past indicative:	Jerry laughed on television.
Future indicative:	Jerry will laugh on television tomorrow.

Generic

Main article: Generic mood

The generic mood is used to generalize about a particular class of things, e.g. in "Rabbits are fast", one is speaking about rabbits in general, rather than about particular fast rabbits. English has no means of morphologically distinguishing generic mood from indicative mood; however, the distinction can easily be understood in context by surrounding words. Compare, for example: rabbits are fast, versus, those rabbits are fast. Use of the demonstrative pronoun those implies specific, particular rabbits, whereas omitting it implies the generic mood simply by default.

In German, the same effect is obtained by the introduction of a particle; ja (or ja doch, doch) can be inserted for emphasis.^{[citation needed]}

Ancient Greek had a kind of generic mood, the so-called gnomic tense, marked by the aorist indicative (normally reserved for statements about the past). It was used especially to express philosophical truths about the world.

Declarative

The declarative mood (abbreviated dec) indicates that the statement is true, without any qualifications being made. It is in many languages equivalent to the indicative mood, although sometimes distinctions between them are drawn. It is closely related with the inferential mood.

Energetic

Found in Classical Arabic and various other Semitic languages, the energetic mood expresses something which is strongly believed or which the speaker wishes to emphasize, e.g. yaktubanna يَكتُبَنَّ ("he certainly writes").

References

1. ^ The Cambridge history of the English language. Richard M. Hogg, Roger Lass, Norman Francis Blake, Suzanne Romaine, R. W. Burchfield, John Algeo. (2000).