Everything about Conditional Mood totally explained
The
conditional mood is the form of the verb used in
conditional sentences to refer to a hypothetical state of affairs, or an uncertain event that's 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.
Conditional verb forms can also have temporal uses, often for expressing "future in the past"
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.
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 (for example
cantá-lo-ia, see
Portuguese personal pronouns and possessives).
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:
» Lat. cantāre habuit > *cantare ebbe > It. canterebbe
Romanian uses an analytic construction for the conditional, for example 1sg
aş cânta. (The auxiliary element may derive ultimately from Latin
habēre, or it could be a reduced form of a volitional verb
a vrea or
a voi.)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Conditional Mood'.
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