[thaumasiotes]

> because English doesn't conjugate for mood

It does, but like some other English inflectional patterns the syntax is mostly vestigial.

All I ask is that the two of you be polite to each other has be in subjunctive mood; if it were indicative, it would be are instead.

Something that I find interesting is that, while conjugating verbs for mood is largely vestigial in English, the more general phenomenon of paying close attention to the relationship between the sentence and reality, the focus that mood expresses, is very much alive. It's just that it's mostly moved out of the inflectional system.

[Twey]

It has constructs for a few different moods/modes[1], but no conjugation: the morphology used to form moods is borrowed from other verb forms (in your example, the bare infinitive) that were never (as far as I know!) dedicated mood conjugations.

[1]: pedantically they are ‘modes’ in the linguistic jargon, but often referred to as ‘moods’ in discussions of English grammar: linguistically a mood is the grammatical morphology used to signify a mode, which English lacks.

[thaumasiotes]

> It has constructs for a few different moods/modes[1], but no conjugation: the morphology used to form moods is borrowed from other verb forms (in your example, the bare infinitive) that were never (as far as I know!) dedicated mood conjugations.

Well, this is mixing an argument about the facts with an argument about the history.

On the facts this is a mood expressed by conjugating the verb. It obviously isn't an infinitive form because it's a finite verb. It is identical with the infinitive form, and this is a general rule of English (only observable with this one verb), but there's nothing stopping different forms from being identical, even identical by rule. In Latin the nominative and accusative case of a neuter noun are always identical.

[Twey]

Sorry, I didn't mean to confuse matters — by pulling in the etymology of the morphology I was trying to be generous to the argument. Namely, I thought there might be a chance that the bare infinitive in e.g. the conditional mood is derived from an older true mood (in the linguistic sense, i.e. a verb form that is sufficient to signify the mode), which I would consider a pretty reasonable justification for considering the bare infinitive there to be a true conditional mood, albeit one that happens to be identical to other forms. I couldn't find evidence for it though, and as far as I know it's not a common feature in other Germanic languages.

As for the syntactic argument — I think it would usually be said not to be the case due to the periphrastic nature of the construction. That is, it's not the verb conjugation itself that signifies the mode but the combination of a conjugation (that is used in a variety of different constructions) with the ‘that’ (or ‘would’, aut cetera, for other moods). As with a lot of these things, though, it's significantly a matter of the conventional definition of terms. For instance in English grammar the ‘full infinitive’ ‹to + bare infinitive› is usually considered a conjugation even though it includes an extra particle. Go figure :)

On that note, it's important to distinguish syntax from semantics: the term ‘bare infinitive’ doesn't mean that morphology is _semantically_ infinitive, the infinitive was just picked as the class representative to name that particular morphology, which is known as the ‘bare infinitive’ wherever it occurs. Ditto with ‘past participle’ and ‘present participle’, and especially ‘gerund’ (which is named after a grammatical function that doesn't even exist in English!).

[thaumasiotes]

> I thought there might be a chance that the bare infinitive in e.g. the conditional mood is derived from an older true mood...

CGEL says this:

Given that the three constructions in [24] always select identical verb-forms, it is inappropriate to take imperative, subjunctive, and infinitival as inflectional categories. That, however, is what the traditional grammar does, again retaining distinctions that were valid at an earlier stage of the language but have since been lost

[I'm taking a position that disagrees with this one, but it does address the use of mood in earlier stages of English.]

I feel that that may not directly address your specific question, but it's hard to know what that question is, since English conditional clauses do not use the form you identify as 'bare infinitive'.

> ...an older true mood (in the linguistic sense, i.e. a verb form that is sufficient to signify the mode)

This doesn't make sense. A verb form is never sufficient to signify the semantic mode of a sentence. Nobody ever argues that Latin didn't have inflectional mood, but good luck identifying why a verb appears in the subjunctive if you can't see the rest of the sentence around it.

(There is a whole traditional taxonomy of different Latin subjunctives; the most common cases are conditional clauses, which use subjunctive mood to indicate counterfactuality, commands ("jussive subjunctive"), and wishes ("optative subjunctive"). Another case is "the verb is part of an indirect question". [Do indirect statements use subjunctive verbs? Nooooooooo...])

So, for English, we have a distinction in semantic modality that obligates us to use an exotically-conjugated verb. Why is this not an example of grammatical mood?

[Twey]

> CGEL says this

On further investigation I guess that Old English did indeed have a dedicated subjective conjugation, unique at least in the plural!

> good luck identifying why a verb appears in the subjunctive if you can't see the rest of the sentence around it.

The question of _why_ a verb is in a particular conjunction is one thing; the question of _whether_ a verb is conjugated, though, shouldn't really be in doubt.

> A verb form is never sufficient to signify the semantic mode of a sentence.

In languages with conjugated grammatical mood, the conjugation is indeed enough to signify the mood of the verb, just as in languages with conjugated past tense verbs in the past tense can be recognized by their conjugation.

> So, for English, we have a distinction in semantic modality that obligates us to use an exotically-conjugated verb. Why is this not an example of grammatical mood?

I think we might be talking at cross purposes. English certainly does have (several! though the precise set might depend on whom you ask) grammatical moods (in the English-grammar sense of grammatical constructions that convey mode). I don't know of anybody who argues that it doesn't. What English doesn't have, and Turkish (as well as Latin) does, is _conjugated_ mood, i.e. a particular mutation of verbs that associates a particular mode with that verb.