Verb morphosyntactic categories

PIE verb mood

The grammatical mood system of early PIE was very simple consisting of only two moods, though it was eventually extended into a more complex system in the descendent Nuclear IE branch.¹

Early PIE

Originally PIE only has two reconstructable moods:

• Indicative with past and present tense — Used for statements.
• Imperative unmarked for tense — Used for commands.

These were distinguished by polyfunctional verb endings. It is unclear whether additional moods (see below) should be reconstructed for PIE since no reflexes have been proven in the Anatolian system.

Nuclear IE

Nuclear IE saw the appearance of two additional moods, such that the complete paradigm was as follows:

• Indicative with past and present tense — Used for statements.
• Imperative unmarked for tense — Used for commands.
• Subjunctive unmarked for tense — Used to express events as not fully realised, including future events.
• Optative unmarked for tense — Used to express wishes or desires.

Indicative and imperative continued to be marked by PIE verb endings, while subjunctive and optative were inflected within the stem.

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tidy | en | sembr

Footnotes

1. 2017. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 28 ↩