Languages express attitudes like doubt and uncertainty through grammatical mood, with some having more than others. Epistemic mood expresses uncertainty, while interrogative mood asks questions. English has three or four moods, including subjunctive and imperative. Interrogative mood is debated as a true mood, but is used to express uncertainty and confirmation in many languages. Some languages have specific verb inflections for interrogative mood, but it can also be expressed through other linguistic forms.
All human languages have ways or means of expressing attitudes such as doubt, uncertainty or unreality using morphological or syntactical forms. Some languages have numerous ways of expressing mood, such as Nenets, spoken in far northern Russia, which has 16 moods. Other languages, like English, have only three or four moods. While most linguistic studies of modality focus on epistemic grammatical mood, which refers to the ways speakers express uncertainty and unreality using specific structures and forms, other types of modalities may exist. Interrogative mood, which includes structures related to asking questions, can be included in this group, although it differs somewhat from other expressions of mood found in languages around the world.
Grammatical mood is a set of verb inflections – expressed as syntactic constructions or inflections of the verb form itself – that add emotional color to an utterance. In English, for example, the subjunctive allows the speaker to make statements about the reality or unreality of situations in sentences such as “If I’d known you’d be late, I would have waited.” Because English is largely not an inflected language, verb structures like the past perfect and the conditional “would” express that the situation is in the past, so it has no chance of becoming real in the speaker’s present tense. Other types of modality include the indicative mood, which states a fact, such as the sentence “He is here”; and the imperative, which is for commands or requests, such as the phrase “Come here.”
Some linguists question whether ensembles for asking questions – an interrogative mood – can be considered a real mood. These structures can include variations in syntactic patterns, such as reversing elements in the sentence. In some languages, such as English, the subject-verb order can be reversed in questions, such as the statement “is it here” becoming the question “Is it here?”
Questions can only be created through inflection, conveying disbelief or a need for confirmation, as in, “Are you coming to the party?” When questions involve grammatical polarity or yes-or-no questions, they might have other types of grammatical features to express the questioning, such as adding tag questions, as in, “You’re coming, aren’t you?” They could also use particles, as in “That’s very stupid, isn’t it?”
Interrogative structures appear to be semantically similar across language groups, although their expression in linguistic forms varies widely. Only a few languages, such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Korean, have a true interrogative mood characterized by specific verb inflections, such as the addition of particles or a change in the form of the verb. The use of interrogative structures to express moods such as uncertainty about an outcome, verifying an assumption, and confirming a truth, however, can be found in languages around the world. This suggests the presence of an interrogative mood in a broader sense than verbal morphology alone.
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