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The conditional mood (or conditional tense) is the form of the verb used in conditional sentences to refer to a hypothetical state of affairs, or an uncertain event that is contingent on another set of circumstances. The conditional mood is thus similar to the subjunctive mood, although languages that have distinct verb forms for the two use them in distinct ways. In linguistics, many grammars have the concept of grammatical mood, which describes the relationship of a verb with reality and intent. ...
In linguistics, conditional sentences are sentences discussing hypothetical situations and their consequences. ...
// Introduction The subjunctive mood (sometimes referred to as the conjunctive mood) is a grammatical mood of the verb that expresses wishes, commands (in subordinate clauses), emotion, possibility, judgment, necessity and statements that are contrary to fact. ...
Conditional verb forms can also have temporal uses, often for expressing "future in the past" tense. Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. ...
In English, the conditional mood is a compound verb form consisting of the modal auxiliary verb would (or could, might, should) and the infinitive form of the main verb. The English modal auxiliary verbs are will and would shall and should may and might can and could must ought to Modal auxiliary verbs help other verbs express a meaning or an idea but have no meaning by themselves. ...
In grammar, the infinitive is the form of a verb that has no inflection to indicate person, number, mood or tense. ...
Conditional forms in Romance
While Latin used the indicative and subjunctive in conditional sentences, most of the Romance languages developed a conditional paradigm. The evolution of these forms (and of the innovative Romance future tense forms) is a well-known example of grammaticalization, whereby a syntactically and semantically independent word becomes a bound morpheme with a highly reduced semantic function. The Romance conditional (and future) forms are derived from the Latin infinitive followed by a finite form of the verb habēre. This verb originally meant "own/possess" in Classical Latin, but in Late Latin picked up a grammatical use as a temporal/modal auxiliary. The fixing of word order (infinitive + auxiliary) and the phonological reduction of the inflected forms of habēre eventually led to the fusion of the two elements into a single synthetic form. Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ...
The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ...
It has been suggested that Future perfect tense be merged into this article or section. ...
Grammaticalisation, also referred to as Grammaticalization, Grammatisation or Grammatization is a theory describing the change of a content word (lexical morpheme) into a function word or grammatical affix. ...
In French, Spanish, and Portuguese, the conditional endings come from the imperfect of Latin habēre. For example, in the 1st person singular:
- Lat. cantāre habēbam > Fr. je chanterais, Sp. cantaría, Port. cantaria
A trace of the historical presence of two separate verbs can still be seen in the possibility of mesoclisis in conservative varieties of European Portuguese, where an object pronoun can appear between the verb stem and the conditional ending (e.g. cantá-lo-ia, see Portuguese pronouns). Italian had a similar form, but it also developed conditional verbs based on the perfect forms of habēre, and these are the forms that survive in modern Italian: This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
The pronouns of the Portuguese language have flexions according to their number and, in case of some third person forms, also according to their gender. ...
- Lat. cantāre habuī > It. canterei
Romanian uses an analytic construction for the conditional, e.g. 1sg aş cânta. (The auxiliary element may derive ulitmately from Latin habēre, or it could be a reduced form of a volitional verb a vrea or a voi.)
References - Benveniste, E. 1968. "Mutations of linguistic categories". In Y. Malkiel and W.P. Lehmann (eds) Directions for historical linguistics, pp. 83-94. Austin and London: University of Texas Press.
- Joseph, Brian D. 1983. The synchrony and diachrony of the Balkan infinitive: a study in general, areal, and historical linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-27318-8.
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