ABSTRACT
Moods are formal and systematic manifestations of modality. In the 1931 edition of the Gramatica de la lengua espanola, the Royal Spanish Language Academy listed five moods: the infinitive, the indicative, the conditional, the subjunctive and the imperative. In Spanish and many other languages, moods are represented by verb endings that have the function to characterize the speaker's attitude with respect to what s/he communicates. Other categories of the verb such as tense and aspect are expressed with the help of verb endings or morphemes as well. Morphemes consist of phonemes, the smallest building blocks that make up languages. Phonemes' distinguishing features can be used to build and differentiate meaningful linguistic units, such as morphemes and words. Because verb endings are grammatical morphemes, they can only have a very general grammatical meaning that is much more abstract than the meaning of words or lexicon items, which is just an abstraction of the specific uses in different contexts.
