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Conditional sentences are natural language sentences that express that one thing is contingent on something else, e.g. "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the main clause of the sentence is conditional on the dependent clause. A full conditional thus contains two clauses: a dependent clause ...
These conditionals differ in both form and meaning. The indicative conditional uses the present tense form "owns" and therefore conveys that the speaker is agnostic about whether Sally in fact owns a donkey. The counterfactual example uses the fake tense form "owned" in the "if" clause and the past-inflected modal "would" in the "then" clause ...
A conditional is understood as expressing its consequent under the temporary hypothetical assumption of its antecedent. Conditional sentences can take numerous forms. The consequent can precede the "if"-clause and the word "if" itself may be omitted or replaced with a different complementizer. The consequent can be a declarative, an ...
Conditional mood. The conditional mood ( abbreviated cond) is a grammatical mood used in conditional sentences to express a proposition whose validity is dependent on some condition, possibly counterfactual.
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. [ 1][ 2]: 181 [ 3] That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement of fact, of desire, of command, etc.). The term is also used more broadly to describe ...
The defining example is Whorf's observation of discrepancies between the grammar of time expressions in Hopi and English. More recent research in this vein is Lucy's research describing how usage of the categories of grammatical number and of numeral classifiers in the Mayan language Yucatec result in Mayan speakers classifying objects ...
Universal grammar. Universal grammar ( UG ), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the ...
Irrealis mood. In linguistics, irrealis moods ( abbreviated IRR) are the main set of grammatical moods that indicate that a certain situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking. This contrasts with the realis moods. They are used in statements without truth value (imperative, interrogative, subordinate ...