Debitive mood is a

grammatical mood In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement of ...

used in Latvian to express obligation or duty. In debitive mood all persons are formed by declining the pronoun in the

dative case In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a ...

and using the 3rd person present stem prefixed with . Auxiliary verbs in case of compound tenses do not change, e.g., – "I have to read, I had to read, I have had to read, I will have to read, I should have read" (literally "I will have to had read" where the future expresses rather a wish and replacing the future with subjunctive () would be less unorthodox.) More complex compound tenses/moods can be formed as well, e.g., quotative debitive: man – "I will supposedly have to read," and so forth. Some authors question the status of Latvian debitive as a mood on the grounds that a mood by definition cannot be combined with another mood (as can be seen above.) Some speculateBjörn Hansen, Ferdinand De Haan. Modals in the Languages of Europe: A Reference Work. . "(..) seem to be connected with this language's failure to develop a personal verb for 'to have' on which necessitive constructions could be based or modelled. (..) is a truncated form of , the imperative of 'let'" that the failure of Latvian to develop a verb "to have" has contributed to the development of debitive. To express possession of something as well as necessity Latvian uses similar constructions to those used by

Finnic languages The Finnic (''Fennic'') or more precisely Balto-Finnic (Balto-Fennic, Baltic Finnic, Baltic Fennic) languages constitute a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by the Baltic Finnic peoples. There are around 7 mi ...

, for example: * Latvian: * Livonian: , (literally "to me is need to go.")

References

{{Reflist Grammatical moods Latvian grammar