Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
Grammatical category of verbs which expresses the subjective attitude of the speaker towards the state of affairs described by the utterance.
Most languages have independent paradigms for the indicative mood (a neutral category), the subjunctive for expressing unreal states, and the imperative for expressing commands. Some languages have other subtypes of moods such as the conditional in French for expressing a possible reality, the optative in Greek, Turkish, and Finnish for expressing fulfillable wishes, the dubitative in Turkish for expressing a suspicion, the energetic in Arabic for expressing an emphatic assertion.
The formulation of modality is not limited to the corresponding morphological verb forms, but can also be expressed lexically, as with modal auxiliaries (want, can, etc.) and sentence adverbials (hopefully, maybe); cf. the semantic category of modality.
References
modality
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