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In this answered question

An user said this ((5 moods × 2 tenses) + (1 defective mood)) × (4 aspects × 2 voices) But what I don't understand is about the moods that he/she mentioned.

Indicative, Interrogative ,Subjunctive and what else?

Phil
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    There are as many moods in English as you want to classify. Mood is a category of a verbal system like Latin, where verbs inflect for mood. In English, similar functions are achieved by using a family of modal verbs.

    Those who insist that English grammar has something to do with Latin grammar will tell you that I will go is a tense while I would go is a mood. This is plainly nonsense: they are syntactically indistinguishable, and classifying them as different on the basis of what they would be if you translated them into a different language is simply mad.

    – Colin Fine Jan 01 '15 at 12:15
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    The Wikipedia article is useful Grammatically, English has no moods, since verbs are not inflected for modality. Syntactically, there are hundreds of idioms and constructions expressing modality; possibility and fantasy are our favorite topics. – John Lawler Jan 01 '15 at 15:04

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The user is using "mood" to refer to modal verbs indicating the speaker's attitude to the verb. They list them right in the answer.

Really we have 4 modal verbs which occur in present/past tense pairs: will/would, shall/should, can/could, may/might, and then must which can only be present-tense.

For more details, see the answer you linked in the question, in particular the section titled "Now you've made me upset" (this is a play on words).

augurar
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  • It's an interesting question whether modals have any tense forms; they don't have infinitives or participles. They can all refer to the present, past, and future, in several ways, but they're never inflected for any tense, except the unproductive irregular weak preterite modals, of which must is one; -- doesn't feel very "past", does it? – John Lawler Jan 01 '15 at 15:00
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    @JohnLawler Although I would tend to agree with this, modals do enter into sequence of tense effects: "John said that Mary would go" has the "will" reading in the embedded clause just like "John said that Mary was pregnant" has the present tense reading in the embedded clause. And "John said that Mary will go" can only mean that relative to now, Mary will go, just like "John said that Mary is pregnant" can only be relative to now. – Alan Munn Jan 02 '15 at 03:57
  • Those are fairly infrequent and are simply more modal idioms, like the "subjunctive", which have been labelled with traditional names (like "sequence of tenses") that makes people want to cling to them because they think they understand them. However, as we prove here daily, nobody actually knows the rules; they're figments of one's schoolteacher's imagination, and nobody can ever recapture that wonderful feeling of being in control of one's language by chanting ancient grammar. It worked for Pāṇini, but he actually did give all the rules. – John Lawler Jan 02 '15 at 16:04
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Oxford's answer in Grammar A-Z (I have changed the order):

Mood

1 indicative mood, expressing facts

2 subjunctive mood, expressing wishes or possibility

3 conditional mood, expressing a condition

4 imperative mood, expressing a command

5 interrogative mood, expressing a question

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/moods

You don't speak of defective mood, only of defective verbs, verbs that have not all possible forms.

Mood and aspect are different things. Mood describes how a statement is meant, as something real or not real, as a wish, a command or a question.

Aspect describes how an action is seen, in English mainly in progress or not in progress. Other languages can have forms that stress the beginning or the end of an action or a habitual action.

rogermue
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    My goodness, they forgot the optative, expressing a hope; and the benedictive, expressing a blessing. Very limited horizon, given that none of the others are distinguishable grammatically, either. – John Lawler Jan 01 '15 at 14:53
  • In English your optative and benedictive and preventive and a lot more ives you can invent are simply expressed by subjunctive. The finer differenciations one can make are expressed by the context, either by the verb (I wish) or the wish formula (God bless you) and so on. – rogermue Jan 01 '15 at 16:45
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    If there were a subjunctive mood, that might be correct. But, as pointed out, English verbs don't inflect for mood, voice, gender, person (except 3rd), or number (except sg). Unlike many other Indo-European languages. – John Lawler Jan 01 '15 at 18:52