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Conditional verb forms can also have temporal uses, often for expressing "future in the past" Tense . In English, the conditional mood is a compound verb form consisting of the Modal Auxiliary Verb ''would'' (or ''could'', ''might'', ''should'') and the Infinitive form of the main verb. CONDITIONAL FORMS IN ROMANCE While Latin the indicative and subjunctive in conditional sentences, most of the Romance Languages developed a conditional paradigm. The evolution of these forms (and of the innovative Romance Future Tense forms) is a well-known example of Grammaticalization , whereby a syntactically and semantically independent word becomes a bound morpheme with a highly reduced semantic function. The Romance conditional (and future) forms are derived from the Latin infinitive followed by a finite form of the verb ''habēre''. This verb originally meant "own/possess" in Classical Latin, but in Late Latin picked up a grammatical use as a temporal/modal auxiliary. The fixing of word order (infinitive + auxiliary) and the phonological reduction of the inflected forms of ''habēre'' eventually led to the fusion of the two elements into a single synthetic form. In French , Spanish , and Portuguese , the conditional endings come from the imperfect of Latin ''habēre''. For example, in the 1st person singular: :Lat. cantāre habēbam > Fr. je chanterais, Sp. cantaría, Port. cantaria A trace of the historical presence of two separate verbs can still be seen in the possibility of Mesoclisis in conservative varieties of European Portuguese, where an object pronoun can appear between the verb stem and the conditional ending (e.g. ''cantá-lo-ia'', see Portuguese Personal Pronouns And Possessives ). Italian had a similar form, but it also developed conditional verbs based on the perfect forms of ''habēre'', and these are the forms that survive in modern Italian:
Romanian uses an analytic construction for the conditional, e.g. 1sg ''aş cânta''. (The auxiliary element may derive ultimately from Latin ''habēre'', or it could be a reduced form of a volitional verb ''a vrea'' or ''a voi''.) REFERENCES
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