The linguistic category of unreality represents a fundamental dimension of human cognition and language, enabling speakers to conceptualize and verbalize situations that are hypothetical, imagined, desired, possible, or contrary to fact. In English, unreality is not encoded through a single grammatical marker or a fully grammaticalized irrealis mood; rather, it emerges from a complex interaction of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic mechanisms. This article presents a comprehensive and Scopus-ready analysis of the linguistic means used to express unreality in English syntax. Particular attention is devoted to grammatical mood, tense–aspect configurations, modal auxiliaries, conditional constructions, and selected syntactic patterns such as wish-clauses and comparative clauses introduced by as if and as though. The study adopts a descriptive and functional approach, drawing on established theories of modality, modal remoteness, and counterfactuality. The analysis demonstrates that unreality in English is realized through systematic tense shifts, modal distancing, and periphrastic constructions that together form a coherent functional system. The findings contribute to contemporary grammatical theory and have direct implications for contrastive linguistics, translation studies, and advanced foreign language pedagogy.