Deductive mood

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (September 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Deductive mood is a grammatical mood that indicates that the truth of the statement was deduced from other information, rather than being directly known. In English, deductive mood is often indicated by the word must, which is also used for many other purposes. By contrast, some other languages have special words or verb affixes to indicate deductive mood specificially.

An example in English:

There's gas in the house! Someone must have left the stove on!

(deductive indicated by must)