Grammatical conjugation
Encyclopedia
In linguistics
, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb
from its principal parts
by inflection
(regular alteration according to rules of grammar
). Conjugation may be affected by person
, number
, gender
, tense
, aspect
, mood
, voice, or other grammatical categories
. All the different forms of the same verb constitute a lexeme
and the form of the verb that is conventionally used to represent the canonical form of the verb (one as seen in dictionary entries) is a lemma. Inflection of noun
s and adjective
s is known as declension
.
Conjugated forms of a verb are called finite forms
. In many languages there are also one or more forms that remain unchanged with all or most of grammatical categories: the non-finite forms
, such as the infinitive
or the gerund
. A table giving all the conjugated variants of a verb in a given language is called a conjugation table or a verb paradigm.
A regular verb
has a set of conventions for conjugation (paradigm) that derives all forms from a few specific forms or principal parts
(maybe only one, such as the infinitive in English), in spelling or pronunciation. A verb that has conjugations deviating from this convention is said to be an irregular verb
. Typically the principal parts are the root
and/or several modifications of it (stems).
Conjugation is also the traditional name of a group of verbs that share a similar conjugation pattern in a particular language (a verb class). This is the sense in which teachers say that Latin
has four conjugations of verbs. This means that any regular Latin verb can be conjugated in any person, number, tense, mood, and voice by knowing which of the four conjugation groups it belongs to, and its principal parts.
Indo-European languages
usually inflect
verbs for several grammatical categories in complex paradigms, although some, like English, have simplified verb conjugation to a large extent. Afrikaans and Swedish have gone even further and virtually abandoned verb conjugation altogether. Below is the conjugation of the verb to be in the present tense (of the infinitive, if it exists, and indicative moods), in English
, German
, Dutch
, Afrikaans
, Icelandic
, Swedish
, Latvian
, Bulgarian
, Bosnian
, Serbian
, Croatian
, Polish
, Slovenian
, Hindi
, Persian
, Latin
, French
, Italian
, Spanish
, Portuguese
, Albanian
, Armenian
, Ancient Attic Greek and Modern Greek
. This is usually the most irregular verb. The similarities in corresponding verb forms may be noticed. Some of the conjugations may be disused, like the English thou
-form, or have additional meanings, like the English you
-form, which can also stand for second person singular or be impersonal
.
-syntactic
construct in which properties of the subject
and/or object
s of a verb
are indicated by the verb form. Verbs are then said to agree
with their subjects (resp. objects).
Many English
verbs exhibit subject agreement of the following sort: whereas I go, you go, we go, they go are all grammatical in standard English, she go is not. Instead, a special form of the verb to go has to be used to produce she goes. On the other hand I goes, you goes etc. are not grammatical in standard English. (Things are different in some English dialects that lack agreement.) A few English verbs have no special forms that indicate subject agreement (I may, you may, she may), and the verb to be has an additional form am that can only be used with the pronoun I as the subject.
Verbs in written French
exhibit more intensive agreement morphology
than English verbs: je suis (I am), tu es ("you are", singular informal
), elle est (she is), nous sommes (we are), vous êtes ("you are", plural), ils sont (they are). Historically, English used to have a similar verbal paradigm. Some historic verb forms are used by Shakespeare
as slightly archaic or more formal variants (I do, thou dost, she doth, typically used by nobility) of the modern forms.
Some languages with verbal agreement can leave certain subjects implicit when the subject is fully determined by the verb form. In Spanish
, for instance, subject pronouns do not need to be explicitly present, even though in French, its close relative, they are obligatory. The Spanish equivalent to the French je suis (I am) can be simply soy (lit. "am"). The pronoun yo (I) in the explicit form yo soy is only required for emphasis or to clear ambiguity in complex texts.
Some languages have a richer agreement system in which verbs also agree with some or all of their objects. Ubykh
exhibits verbal agreement for the subject, direct object, indirect object, benefaction and ablative objects (a.w3.s.xe.n.t'u.n, you gave it to him for me).
Basque
can show agreement not only for subject, direct object and indirect object, but it also on occasion exhibits agreement for the listener as the implicit benefactor: autoa ekarri digute means "they brought us the car" (neuter agreement for listener), but autoa ekarri ziguten means "they brought us the car" (agreement for feminine singular listener).
Languages with a rich agreement morphology facilitate relatively free word order without leading to increased ambiguity. The canonical word order in Basque is subject–object–verb. However, all permutations of subject, verb and object are permitted.
s and copula
r complements receive a form of person agreement that is distinct from that used on ordinary predicative verb
s. Although this is a form of conjugation in that it refers back to the person of the subject, it is not “verbal” because it always derives from pronoun
s that have become clitic
ised to the nouns to which they refer. An example of nonverbal person agreement, along with contrasting verbal conjugation, can be found from Beja
(person agreement morphemes in bold):
Another example can be found from Ket
:
In Turkic
, and a few Uralic
and Australian Aboriginal languages, predicative adjectives and copular complements take affixes that are identical to those used on predicative verbs, but their negation is different. For example, in Turkish
:
but under negation this becomes (negative morphemes boldface):
For this reason, the person agreement morphemes used with predicative adjectives and nominals in Turkic languages are considered to be nonverbal in character. In some analyses, they are viewed as a form of verbal takeover by a copular strategy.
according to which verbs can be conjugated are the following:
Other factors which may affect conjugation are:
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
from its principal parts
Principal parts
In language learning, the principal parts of a verb are those forms that a student must memorize in order to be able to conjugate the verb through all its forms.- English :...
by inflection
Inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
(regular alteration according to rules of grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
). Conjugation may be affected by person
Grammatical person
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
, number
Grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
, gender
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
, tense
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
, aspect
Grammatical aspect
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...
, mood
Grammatical mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...
, voice, or other grammatical categories
Grammatical category
A grammatical category is a semantic distinction which is reflected in a morphological paradigm. Grammatical categories can have one or more exponents. For instance, the feature [number] has the exponents [singular] and [plural] in English and many other languages...
. All the different forms of the same verb constitute a lexeme
Lexeme
A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN...
and the form of the verb that is conventionally used to represent the canonical form of the verb (one as seen in dictionary entries) is a lemma. Inflection of noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
s and adjective
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
s is known as declension
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
.
Conjugated forms of a verb are called finite forms
Finite verb
A finite verb is a verb that is inflected for person and for tense according to the rules and categories of the languages in which it occurs. Finite verbs can form independent clauses, which can stand on their own as complete sentences....
. In many languages there are also one or more forms that remain unchanged with all or most of grammatical categories: the non-finite forms
Non-finite verb
In linguistics, a non-finite verb is a verb form that is not limited by a subject and, more generally, is not fully inflected by categories that are marked inflectionally in language, such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender, and person...
, such as the infinitive
Infinitive
In grammar, infinitive is the name for certain verb forms that exist in many languages. In the usual description of English, the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to: therefore, do and to do, be and to be, and so on are infinitives...
or the gerund
Gerund
In linguistics* As applied to English, it refers to the usage of a verb as a noun ....
. A table giving all the conjugated variants of a verb in a given language is called a conjugation table or a verb paradigm.
A regular verb
Regular verb
A regular verb is any verb whose conjugation follows the typical grammatical inflections of the language to which it belongs. A verb that cannot be conjugated like this is called an irregular verb. All natural languages, to different extents, have a number of irregular verbs...
has a set of conventions for conjugation (paradigm) that derives all forms from a few specific forms or principal parts
Principal parts
In language learning, the principal parts of a verb are those forms that a student must memorize in order to be able to conjugate the verb through all its forms.- English :...
(maybe only one, such as the infinitive in English), in spelling or pronunciation. A verb that has conjugations deviating from this convention is said to be an irregular verb
Irregular verb
In contrast to regular verbs, irregular verbs are those verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of conjugation in the languages in which they occur. The idea of an irregular verb is important in second language acquisition, where the verb paradigms of a foreign language are learned...
. Typically the principal parts are the root
Root (linguistics)
The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family , which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents....
and/or several modifications of it (stems).
Conjugation is also the traditional name of a group of verbs that share a similar conjugation pattern in a particular language (a verb class). This is the sense in which teachers say that Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
has four conjugations of verbs. This means that any regular Latin verb can be conjugated in any person, number, tense, mood, and voice by knowing which of the four conjugation groups it belongs to, and its principal parts.
Examples
In Latin the present conjugation is o, s, t, mus, tis, nt, which respectively means I__, You (singular) __, He/she/it__, we__, you (plural)__, they__.Indo-European languages
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
usually inflect
Inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
verbs for several grammatical categories in complex paradigms, although some, like English, have simplified verb conjugation to a large extent. Afrikaans and Swedish have gone even further and virtually abandoned verb conjugation altogether. Below is the conjugation of the verb to be in the present tense (of the infinitive, if it exists, and indicative moods), in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, Afrikaans
Afrikaans
Afrikaans is a West Germanic language, spoken natively in South Africa and Namibia. It is a daughter language of Dutch, originating in its 17th century dialects, collectively referred to as Cape Dutch .Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch; see , , , , , .Afrikaans was historically called Cape...
, Icelandic
Icelandic language
Icelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
, Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
, Latvian
Latvian language
Latvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language...
, Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
, Bosnian
Bosnian language
Bosnian is a South Slavic language, spoken by Bosniaks. As a standardized form of the Shtokavian dialect, it is one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina....
, Serbian
Serbian language
Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
, Croatian
Croatian language
Croatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...
, Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, Slovenian
Slovenian language
Slovene or Slovenian is a South Slavic language spoken by approximately 2.5 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia. It is the first language of about 1.85 million people and is one of the 23 official and working languages of the European Union...
, Hindi
Hindi
Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
, Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
, Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, Albanian
Albanian language
Albanian is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 7.6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, southern Serbia and northwestern Greece...
, Armenian
Armenian language
The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...
, Ancient Attic Greek and Modern Greek
Modern Greek
Modern Greek refers to the varieties of the Greek language spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic...
. This is usually the most irregular verb. The similarities in corresponding verb forms may be noticed. Some of the conjugations may be disused, like the English thou
Thou
The word thou is a second person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. It is used in parts of Northern England and by Scots. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee , and the possessive is thy or thine...
-form, or have additional meanings, like the English you
You
You is the second-personpersonal pronoun, both singular and plural, and both nominative and objective case, in Modern English. The oblique/objective form you functioned originally as both accusative and dative)...
-form, which can also stand for second person singular or be impersonal
Generic you
In English grammar and in particular in casual English, generic you or indefinite you is the pronoun you in its use in referring to an unspecified person, as opposed to its use as the second person pronoun.-In English:...
.
| Branch | Language | Present infinitive |
Present indicative | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singular persons | Plural persons | ||||||||
| 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | ||||
| Germanic | English | be | am | are art |
is | are | |||
| German | sein | bin | bist | ist | sind | seid | sind | ||
| Dutch | zijn | ben | bent zijt1 |
is | zijn | zijn zijt1 |
zijn | ||
| Afrikaans | wees | is | |||||||
| Icelandic | vera | er | ert | er | erum | eruð | eru | ||
| Swedish | vara | är | är(o) | ||||||
| Italic | Latin | esse | sum | es | est | sumus | estis | sunt | |
| Italian | essere | sono | sei | è | siamo | siete | sono | ||
| French | être | suis | es | est | sommes | êtes | sont | ||
| Catalan | ser | sóc | ets | és | som | sou | són | ||
| Spanish | ser | soy | eres | es | somos | sois | son | ||
| Portuguese | ser | sou | és | é | somos | sois | são | ||
| Friulian | jessi | soi | sês | è | sin | sês | son | ||
| Romanian | fi | sunt | ești | este | suntem | sunteți | sunt | ||
| Greek | Ancient2 transliterated |
eînai |
eimí |
eî |
estí |
esmén |
esté |
eisí |
|
| Modern transliterated |
none3 | είμαι eímai |
είσαι eísai |
είναι eínai |
είμαστε eímaste |
είσ(ασ)τε eís(as)te |
είναι eínai |
||
| Albanian | none4 | jam | je | është asht5 |
jemi | jeni | janë | ||
| Armenian | Western transliterated |
ըլլալ ĕllal |
Եմ em |
ես es |
է ē |
ենք enk‘ |
էք ēk‘ |
են en |
|
| Eastern transliterated |
լինե linel |
Եմ em |
ես es |
է ē |
ենք enk‘ |
եք ek‘ |
են en |
||
| Slavic | Czech | být | jsem | jsi | je | jsme | jste | jsou | |
| Slovak | byť | som | si | je | sme | ste | sú | ||
| Polish | być | jestem | jesteś | jest | jesteśmy | jesteście | są | ||
| Serbian strong transliterated |
бити biti |
јесам jesam |
јеси jesi |
јест(е) jest(e) |
јесмо jesmo |
јесте jeste |
јесу jesu |
||
| Serbian clitic transliterated |
none | сам sam |
си si |
је je |
смо smo |
сте ste |
су su |
||
| Croatian strong | biti | jesam | jesi | jest(e) | jesmo | jeste | jesu | ||
| Croatian clitic | none | sam | si | je | smo | ste | su | ||
| Slovenian | biti | sem | si | je | smo | ste | so | ||
| Bulgarian transliterated |
none | съм săm |
си si |
е e |
сме sme |
сте ste |
са să |
||
| Macedonian transliterated |
none | сум sum |
си si |
е e |
сме sme |
сте ste |
се se |
||
| Baltic | Latvian | būt | esmu | esi | ir | esam | esat | ir | |
| Lithuanian | būti | esu | esi | yra | esame | esate | yra | ||
| Indo-Iranian | Persian | būdan | hastam -am |
hasti -i |
hast ast, -e |
hastim -im |
hastid -id |
hastand -and |
|
| Hindi | hũũ | hai | hai | hãĩ | ho | hãĩ | |||
- 1In Flemish dialects.
- 2 Attic.
- 3 'eínai' is only used as a noun ("being, existence").
- 4 Ptc: qenë.
- 5 In the Tosk and Geg dialects, respectively.
Verbal agreement
Verbal agreement or concord is a morphoMorphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
-syntactic
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
construct in which properties of the subject
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
and/or object
Object (grammar)
An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...
s of a verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
are indicated by the verb form. Verbs are then said to agree
Agreement (linguistics)
In languages, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates....
with their subjects (resp. objects).
Many English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
verbs exhibit subject agreement of the following sort: whereas I go, you go, we go, they go are all grammatical in standard English, she go is not. Instead, a special form of the verb to go has to be used to produce she goes. On the other hand I goes, you goes etc. are not grammatical in standard English. (Things are different in some English dialects that lack agreement.) A few English verbs have no special forms that indicate subject agreement (I may, you may, she may), and the verb to be has an additional form am that can only be used with the pronoun I as the subject.
Verbs in written French
French verbs
French verbs are a part of speech in French grammar. Each verb lexeme has a collection of finite and non-finite forms in its conjugation scheme....
exhibit more intensive agreement morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
than English verbs: je suis (I am), tu es ("you are", singular informal
T-V distinction
In sociolinguistics, a T–V distinction is a contrast, within one language, between second-person pronouns that are specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee....
), elle est (she is), nous sommes (we are), vous êtes ("you are", plural), ils sont (they are). Historically, English used to have a similar verbal paradigm. Some historic verb forms are used by Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
as slightly archaic or more formal variants (I do, thou dost, she doth, typically used by nobility) of the modern forms.
Some languages with verbal agreement can leave certain subjects implicit when the subject is fully determined by the verb form. In Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, for instance, subject pronouns do not need to be explicitly present, even though in French, its close relative, they are obligatory. The Spanish equivalent to the French je suis (I am) can be simply soy (lit. "am"). The pronoun yo (I) in the explicit form yo soy is only required for emphasis or to clear ambiguity in complex texts.
Some languages have a richer agreement system in which verbs also agree with some or all of their objects. Ubykh
Ubykh language
Ubykh or Ubyx is an extinct language of the Northwestern Caucasian group, spoken by the Ubykh people...
exhibits verbal agreement for the subject, direct object, indirect object, benefaction and ablative objects (a.w3.s.xe.n.t'u.n, you gave it to him for me).
Basque
Basque language
Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
can show agreement not only for subject, direct object and indirect object, but it also on occasion exhibits agreement for the listener as the implicit benefactor: autoa ekarri digute means "they brought us the car" (neuter agreement for listener), but autoa ekarri ziguten means "they brought us the car" (agreement for feminine singular listener).
Languages with a rich agreement morphology facilitate relatively free word order without leading to increased ambiguity. The canonical word order in Basque is subject–object–verb. However, all permutations of subject, verb and object are permitted.
Nonverbal person agreement
In some languages, predicative adjectiveAdjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
s and copula
Copula
In linguistics, a copula is a word used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate . The word copula derives from the Latin noun for a link or tie that connects two different things.A copula is often a verb or a verb-like word, though this is not universally the case...
r complements receive a form of person agreement that is distinct from that used on ordinary predicative verb
Predicative verb
A predicative verb is a verb that behaves as a grammatical adjective; that is, it predicates . It is a special kind of stative verb....
s. Although this is a form of conjugation in that it refers back to the person of the subject, it is not “verbal” because it always derives from pronoun
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
s that have become clitic
Clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...
ised to the nouns to which they refer. An example of nonverbal person agreement, along with contrasting verbal conjugation, can be found from Beja
Beja language
Beja or North Cushitic is an Afro-Asiatic language of the southern coast of the Red Sea, spoken by about two million nomads, the Beja, in parts of Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea.-Classification:...
(person agreement morphemes in bold):
- wun.tu.wi, “you (fem.) are big”
- hadá.b.wa, “you (masc.) are a sheik”
- e.n.fór, “he flees”
Another example can be found from Ket
Ket language
The Ket language, formerly known as Yenisei Ostyak, is a Siberian language long thought to be an isolate, the sole surviving language of a Yeniseian language family...
:
- fèmba.di, “I am a Tungus”
- dɨ.fen, “I am standing”
In Turkic
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
, and a few Uralic
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
and Australian Aboriginal languages, predicative adjectives and copular complements take affixes that are identical to those used on predicative verbs, but their negation is different. For example, in Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
:
- koş.u.yor.sun “you are running”
- çavuş.sun “you are a sergeant”
but under negation this becomes (negative morphemes boldface):
- koş.mu.yor.sun “you are not running”
- çavuş değil.sin “you are not a sergeant”
For this reason, the person agreement morphemes used with predicative adjectives and nominals in Turkic languages are considered to be nonverbal in character. In some analyses, they are viewed as a form of verbal takeover by a copular strategy.
Factors that affect conjugation
Common grammatical categoriesGrammatical category
A grammatical category is a semantic distinction which is reflected in a morphological paradigm. Grammatical categories can have one or more exponents. For instance, the feature [number] has the exponents [singular] and [plural] in English and many other languages...
according to which verbs can be conjugated are the following:
- Finite verb formsFinite verbA finite verb is a verb that is inflected for person and for tense according to the rules and categories of the languages in which it occurs. Finite verbs can form independent clauses, which can stand on their own as complete sentences....
:- Grammatical personGrammatical personGrammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
- Grammatical numberGrammatical numberIn linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
- Grammatical genderGrammatical genderGrammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
- Grammatical tenseGrammatical tenseA tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
- Grammatical aspectGrammatical aspectIn linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...
- Grammatical moodGrammatical moodIn linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...
- Grammatical voice
- Grammatical person
- Non-finite verb formsNon-finite verbIn linguistics, a non-finite verb is a verb form that is not limited by a subject and, more generally, is not fully inflected by categories that are marked inflectionally in language, such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender, and person...
.
Other factors which may affect conjugation are:
- Degree of formality (see T-V distinctionT-V distinctionIn sociolinguistics, a T–V distinction is a contrast, within one language, between second-person pronouns that are specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee....
, Honorific speech in Japanese) - Inclusiveness and exclusiveness in the 1st. person pluralClusivityIn linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we"...
- TransitivityTransitivity (grammatical category)In linguistics, transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects and how many such objects a verb can take...
- ValencyValency (linguistics)In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. It is related, though not identical, to verb transitivity, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate...
Related topics
- Agreement (linguistics)Agreement (linguistics)In languages, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates....
- InflectionInflectionIn grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
- Redundancy (language)Redundancy (language)In linguistics, redundancy is the construction of a phrase that presents some idea using more information, often via multiple means, than is necessary for one to be able understand the idea....
- ScreeveScreeveA screeve is a term of grammatical description in traditional Georgian grammars that roughly corresponds to TAM marking in the Western grammatical tradition. It derives from the Georgian word mts'k'rivi , which means "row". Formally, it refers to a set of six verb forms inflected for person and...
- Strong inflectionStrong inflectionA strong inflection is a system of verb conjugation or noun/adjective declension which can be contrasted with an alternative system in the same language, which is then known as a weak inflection. The term strong was coined with reference to the Germanic verb, but has since been used of other...
- VerbVerbA verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
- Verb argumentVerb argumentIn linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntactic relationship with the verb in a clause. In English, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object....
- Volition (linguistics)Volition (linguistics)In linguistics, volition refers to a distinction that is made in some languages' verb conjugations or case assignment to express whether the subject intended the action or not, or whether it was done voluntarily or accidentally....
- Weak inflectionWeak inflectionIn grammar, the term weak is used in opposition to the term strong to designate a conjugation or declension when a language has two parallel systems...
External links
- Conjugations at Wiktionary, Wikipedia's sister project
- the conjugation English,Spanish and French conjugator.
- Onoma Spanish conjugator. It provides information about the irregularities and conjugates invented verbs.
- Excellent English Verb Conjugation Site All verbs - all forms - all tenses, Many variants, No mistakes: www.conjugation.com
- English Verb Conjugations • English verb phonetic and orthographic constraints
- Lexicon of Linguistics: Conjugation
- Verbix (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, English, &c.)
- Multi-Language conjugation (English and Portuguese)
- French conjugation (More 12000 verbs)
- Italian Verbs Coniugator and Analyzer Regular and Irregular Verbs, and also Neologisms
- spanish.verbconjugation.net shows you how to conjugate Spanish verbs
- Korean conjugation A Korean verb conjugation tool that explains the conjugations for learners of Korean
- Online verb conjugation online English, Spanish, Italian, French and German verb conjugation
- Kaso Verb Conjugation System (FOSS) Side by side conjugations in English, Italian, and Spanish