The subjunctive mood is used in dependent clauses that do the following: "in grammar, designating or of that mood of a verb used to express condition, hypothesis, contingency, possibility, etc., rather than to state an actual fact: distinguished from imperative, indicative".
There are resonant ambiguities: "buckle" for example could be imperative or indicative, and it could mean any of three things: to prepare for action (an archaic meaning), to fasten together, or to bend, crumple and nearly break ("buckled like a bicycle wheel" as William Empson remarked when analysing the poem in Seven Types of Ambiguity).
In English, the presence or absence of the Mood element realizes distinctions between unmarked imperative and indicative clauses, while differences in the ordering of the elements (as well as the present or absence of a WH- element) realize the distinction between declarative and interrogative clauses.
Imperatives and indicative clauses containing MODALITY occupy almost equal statuses in Wong's translation, but a more polite form of imperative, suggestive (Let's/Let us), is adopted by Wong.
The realization of commands is more complicated, with a difference in the selection of major mood types (imperative vs. modulated indicative) and values of MODALITY in modulated indicative clauses.
Appropriating from herself was a kind of postmodernism before the fact, the dissonance of old and new increasing the spiky agitation of the collages (see "Imperative" and "Imperfect Indicative," both 1976).
The verb system is complex but, by and large, regular: it uses indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods; preterite, imperfect, present, future, conditional, and a variety of perfect and progressive tenses; and passive and reflexive constructions.
In Germanic these were reduced to indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods; a full active voice plus passive found only in Gothic; three persons; full singular and plural forms and dual forms found only in Gothic; and one infinitive (present) and two participles (present and past).
The modern language has seven noun cases, two numbers, three persons in the verb, three tenses (present, past, and future), two voices, and three moods (indicative, imperative, and conditional or subjunctive), and it marks verbs for perfective (completed action) and imperfective (action in process or uncompleted action) aspects.
They also use more imperative clauses and indicative clauses with high-valued modality than the latter.
A danger remained of deriving a kind of imperative from an indicative.
