Dubitative mood (abbreviated DUB) is an epistemic grammatical mood found in some languages, that indicates that the statement is dubious, doubtful, or uncertain. It may subsist as a separate morphological category, as in Bulgarian, or else as a category of use of another form, as of the conditional mood of Italian.
An example can be taken from Ojibwe, an Algonquian language of North America. Verbs in Ojibwe can be marked with a dubitative suffix, indicating that the speaker is doubtful or uncertain about what they are saying. So aakozi means "he is sick," while aakozidog can be translated as something like "he must be sick; I guess he's sick; maybe he's sick; he might be sick."
Famous quotes containing the word mood:
“My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is said that words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)