A Critical Analysis of the Verbal Moods in Persian Language

Mood is, in general, a meaning concept that indicates the speaker’s point of view about a proposition. There are different modal elements in each language to embody a mood; in other words, different languages have variety of methods to express modal concepts. Using verbal moods is one of these methods. Verbal mood represents the morphology of a verb and can hence be considered as a grammatical issue. Examining the history of Persian grammar makes it clear that Persian grammarians have finally reached a consensus that there are three different types of moods in Persian language named Indicative, Subjunctive, and Imperative. This study is to show that the distinction between subjunctive and imperative moods, that is just its morphological outbreak, is not a modal distinction and it is not possible to distinguish these two verbal groups in terms of verbal mood. In other words it can be said that there are only two verbal moods in Persian language: indicative and non-indicative. It has also been tried, in present study, to provide an explanation about being zero of the second person singular feature.