Indicative Mood

Indicative mood: grammatical mood

When we talk about 'mood' in English Grammar, we're not talking about our emotions or feelings. Instead, grammatical mood refers to the use of verb forms that indicate (show) the purpose of a sentence, such as whether it's a statement, question, command, etc.

Types and examples of grammatical mood

There are five main types of grammatical mood in English Language:

• The Indicative Mood- stating a fact or belief, e.g. 'Baby flamingos are born grey rather than pink'.
• The Imperative Mood- making requests or commands, e.g. 'Come over and sit by me!'.
• The Subjunctive Mood- expressing a hypothetical situation, wish, possibility, or suggestion, e.g. 'If I were famous, I'd have my own talk show'.
• The Interrogative Mood- asking questions, e.g. 'Where have my glasses gone?'.
• The Conditional Mood- state conditions and make requests, e.g. 'If the restaurant doesn't have steak, I'll get a burger instead'.

Indicative mood meaning

So what exactly is the indicative mood?

Most sentences in the English Language are written or spoken in the indicative mood.

Fig. 1 - The indicative mood states facts, opinions, or face-checking questions.

Indicative mood examples

Examples of the indicative mood include:

Each of these sentences is a statement that expresses either a fact, an opinion, or a statement that checks an assumed fact (often using tag questions such as 'right?' or 'yes?').

Indicative mood: verbs

The indicative mood is the most basic mood of verbs that we use when forming declarative sentences. We can use the indicative mood in any tense.

How do we form the indicative mood?

So how do we recognise a sentence in the indicative mood?

Statement sentences always contain a subject (person/thing doing the action) and a verb. This verb is generally the basic form of the verb (e.g. 'play', 'dance', 'drive') which can be changed according to tense (e.g. 'Sarah played', 'John will drive'), number, or person ('I dance', 'he dances').

Notice how the inflection -ed is added to the base form of the verb to show tense whilst the inflection -s is added to show person.

Punctuation

A sentence in the indicative mood often ends in a full stop as it simply states a fact or an opinion. However, sentences may end in question marks if they are fact-checking questions (e.g. 'you don't like cheese, right?) or exclamation marks for emphasis (e.g. 'cheese is the worst thing ever!').

Indicative mood vs subjective mood

Another type of grammatical mood is called the 'subjunctive mood'. This refers to the use of verb forms to express a wish, obligation, possibility, or suggestion. It often refers to a hypothetical situation which is an event that has not yet happened and may never happen; it is imagined.

All of these sentences express hypothetical situations that have not yet occurred and are not guaranteed to occur.

The subjunctive mood is different to the indicative mood as the indicative mood is used to make statements that are assumed to be true. In contrast, the subjunctive mood refers to hypothetical situations that have not yet occurred.

For example, in the indicative mood we would say 'Sean has played golf all day' as this is a factual statement. However, in the subjunctive mood we may say 'Sean wishes he were playing golf' as it is a hypothetical situation that has not yet occurred.