ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author finds analyses of the English verb which are startlingly different in their employment of the concept of mood, If he looks in the earliest grammars of English, published before the end of the sixteenth century. The other type of analysis of the English verb to be found in these early grammars makes no mention of signs or of moods. Neither Greaves nor Bellot appears to have written anything except these grammars which are certainly not works of originality or importance in the history of grammar. To find why two minor textbook writers come to treat the English verb in such different ways we must trace the grammatical traditions which they found to hand. The importance of this new treatment of mood in Latin to the early analysis of the English verb is due to the accident that Linacre’s speculation was almost immediately incorporated into the elementary Latin grammar appointed for use in all English schools.
