Is the conditional a mood or a tense?

Question

Is the conditional a mood or a tense? I've heard it described in both ways.

It seems more like a mood as it is often lumped with hypothetical constructions and the subjunctive mood. I could see it too as being a kind of nuance of the future though, as the conditional often implies something that will happen when other conditions are met. For example, "If I were a bird, I would fly away."

People have made a tag that says conditional-mood, but it has only been used three times, so I'm not convinced.

Answer 1

Traditionally, it is considered neither, though it is sometimes called a mood for lack of a better word. The word function would seem the best term. I am assuming that you are talking about the word would in your example. The adjective "conditional" just means "related to a condition"; when used as a noun, it usually refers to a function of the past subjunctive tense of modal verbs (would, could, might, and should).

There are three traditional moods in English, indicative, subjunctive, and imperative; there are several tenses, which are combinations of moods, aspects, and temporal properties (you might say past and present are aspects, though they are usually not so called).

There are three types of conditional sentences, as Henry has pointed out, which are mainly just sentences in which an explicit or implicit condition is present. There is a function of the past subjunctive that is called conditional because it is used with one of these types, the so-called hypothetical condition (if he were rich, he would be unhappy). I think that is the one you mean; while it is sometimes called a mood, I find this unclear and confusing: how can something be of two moods, both subjunctive and conditional? Function is the term that both fits best with established terminology and best describes what kind of phenomenon it is.

Answer 2

There's no single "correct" universally agreed upon answer to this. Depending on your theoretical perspective and/or what you've had for breakfast, you could argue along various lines.

The argument in favour of calling it a "mood" is that "mood" is based on the definition of "mood" as something like "the use of verb forms to grammaticalise modality" (where "modality" is itself defined as the expression of a combination of notions including possibility and obligation that essentially mark something is "not a straightforward assertion of truth").

Another point of view is to say that the conditional has an inherent time reference (e.g. "future in the past"), and so constitutes a "tense" just as much as other verb forms with inherent time references. Provided you take the stance that there is some time reference, then the argument about the conditional "having modal uses" isn't so compelling, given that practically any verb form has some modal uses (e.g. "will" and, say, the future tense in Spanish are probably used more often with modal uses such as to indicate a hypothesis than they are actually used to mark futuriority).

I have to say I think the "mood vs tense" omelette is somewhat overegged. Unless you are actually exploring these kinds of theoretical framework, it's hard to see why it matters terribly much either way.

Answer 3

People who are using tense in an informal sense would call the conditional a tense. However, the informal sense of the word tense is, basically this:

I dunno, something to do with verbs? All of those verb things, passive and comparative and future and whatnot, they're all tenses. Now leave me alone.

If you have any pretension to using grammatical terminology accurately, then the conditional is a mood. Tenses specify the time of an event, while moods specify the modality. Referring to the "conditional tense" is an error.

Answer 4

It is described both ways. For those who say that English has three forms of the conditional, then it is a mood. Those who think there is only one use (using the modal verb would) and who have also learnt Romance languages are more likely to say it is a tense combining future and past nuances.

Sensible people will accept either conditional mood or conditional tense without fussing too much.

Answer 5

According to the RAE, the best source to resolve such questions, the conditional is categorized as one of the indicative forms. It would be best, perhaps, to note it as an indicative inflection. It is not a tense because it does not express time in any concrete way, although it does allude to a possible future 1) in the past as related to a subjunctive clause, and 2) in the present as a polite request.