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What is the difference between ”a Mood” and ”a Tense” in English Grammar?


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AussieInBg profile picture AussieInBgAugust 2021
English ”tenses” from a linguistic viewpoint differs from what most people think of it. In short, a tense defines a position in time for a state or an event. A mood on the other hand expresses the manner in which the state or event occurs.

When you see the term ”tense” such as ”present subjunctive tense” being using in standard language learner courses, it is not really a distinct tense at all but a combination of the present tense and the subjunctive mood. The ”12 or 16 English tenses” you hear about from grammar teachers in English language courses are combinations of tenses and moods.

As to how many tenses there are in English, this gets messy. Most grammar books state that there are three tenses in English - past, present and future.

Other grammar books claim there are only two - past and present. ”Future” doesn’t constitute a tense using the argument that tenses are defined by conjugation of verbs and use of auxiliary/modal verbs such as ”will” no longer make the verb form a tense but only an ”aspect”. According to this viewpoint, tenses are only defined when you can distinctly conjugate the verb differently for a point in time, e.g ”to see” - I see, you see, he sees, we see, they see (present) or I saw, you saw, he saw, we saw, they saw. But for ”future”, ”I will see” is not a different tense because ”will” is used to express its future ”aspect”.

Personally, I think that this sort of argument is total nonsense - it’s only syntax defining the point in time aspect and how you define what a specific tense is. If you ”conjugate” the ”future tense” by writing - without a space - ”I willsee”, ”you willsee”.. then you are simply conjugating the verb using a prefix rather than adding suffixes.

In reality, I think that there are more verb tenses in English than just simply ”past”, ”present” and ”future”. There’s also ”past in the past”, ”future in the past”, ”past in the future” and ”future in the future”. These are all different ways of defining a point in time relative to another than simply two or three - and by changing around the syntax.

As for mood, the standard basic ones stated in many text books are indicative, imperative and subjunctive.

”Indicative” is the most common one - stating facts and information. ”Imperative” is about commands whereas ”subjunctive” communicates wishes or requests.

Other grammar books would also state that there are other moods which exist such as the ”interrogative mood” - the question form, or the ”conditional mood” - expressing a proposition dependent on some other condition.

Again, it comes down to definitions of syntax, which are essentially like religious dogma for many, as to whether something is defined as a mood or not. For example, some grammar texts explicitly define question forms as a specific mood whereas others consider questions as only an aspect of other moods such as the indicative.