Speculative mood

{{short description|Epistemic grammatical mood}}

Speculative mood (abbreviated {{sc|spec}}) is an epistemic grammatical mood found in some languages, which indicates that the utterance is based on speculation of the speaker, and not necessarily known to be the case.{{cite web|url=http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsSpeculativeMood.htm|title=What is speculative mood?|publisher=SIL International|work=Glossary of linguistic terms|editor1-last=Loos|editor1-first=Eugene E.|editor2-first=Susan|editor2-last=Anderson|editor3-first=Dwight H. Jr. | editor3-last=Day|editor4-first=Paul C.|editor4-last=Jordan|editor5-first=J. Douglas|editor5-last=Wingate|accessdate=2009-12-28}} For example, "The butler could have been the killer."