Grammatical conjugation

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Grammatical conjugation

In linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb

Verb

In syntax, a verb is a word that usually denotes an action , an occurrence , or a state of being . Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its grammatical tense, grammatical aspect, grammatical mood and grammatical voice....
, noun

Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open class 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....
or adjective

Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntax role is to grammatical modifier a noun or pronoun, giving more information about the noun or pronoun's definition....
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 grammatical conjugation the verb through all its forms....
by inflection

Inflection

Grammar

Grammar is the field of linguistics that covers the conventions governing the use of any given natural language. It includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics....
). Conjugation may be affected by person

Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deixis 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

In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once....
, tense

Grammatical tense

Grammatical tense is a temporal language quality expressing the time at, during, or over which a state or action denoted by a verb occurs.Tense is one of at least five qualities, along with grammatical mood, grammatical voice, grammatical aspect, and grammatical person, which verb forms may express....
, aspect

Grammatical aspect

In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb defines the temporal flow in the described event or state. In English, for example, the past-tense sentences "I swam" and "I was swimming" differ in aspect ....
, mood

Grammatical mood

Grammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive verb forms that are used to signal Linguistic modality.It is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although these concepts are conflated to some degree in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages, insofar as the same word patterns are used...
, voice

Grammatical voice

In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its verb arguments ....
, or other grammatical categories

Grammatical category

A grammatical category or functional category is a linguistic term encompassing, among other things:*Animacy*Countability *Definiteness ...
. All the different forms of the same verb constitute a lexeme

Lexeme

A lexeme is an abstract Unit of Morphology Semantic analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word....
and the form of the verb that is conventionally used to represent the canonical form of the verb is a lemma

Lemma (linguistics)

In linguistics a lemma has two distinct interpretations:# morphology / lexicography: the canonical form or citation form of a set of forms ; e.g....
.

Conjugated forms of a verb are called finite forms

Finite verb

A finite verb is a verb that is Inflection for grammatical person and for grammatical tense according to the rules and categories of the languages in which it occurs....
.

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Encyclopedia

In linguistics

Linguistics

Verb

Noun

Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntax role is to grammatical modifier a noun or pronoun, giving more information about the noun or pronoun's definition....
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 grammatical conjugation the verb through all its forms....
by inflection

Inflection

Grammar

Grammatical person

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 tense

Grammatical aspect

Grammatical mood

Grammatical voice

In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its verb arguments ....
, or other grammatical categories

Grammatical category

Lexeme

Lemma (linguistics)

Finite verb

A finite verb is a verb that is Inflection for grammatical person and for grammatical tense according to the rules and categories of the languages in which it occurs....
. 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 inflection by categories that are marked inflectionally in language, such as grammatical tense, grammatical aspect, grammatical mood, grammatical number, grammatical gender, and grammatical 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 language, the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the grammatical particle to: therefore, do and to do, be and to be, and so on are infinitives....
or the gerund

Gerund

In linguistics, ?gerund? is a term used to refer to various non-finite verb in various languages:* As applied to English language, it refers to what might be called a verb's action noun, which is one of the uses of the -ing form....
. 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 it belongs to.A verb that cannot be conjugated like this is called an irregular verb....
has a paradigm of conjugation 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 grammatical conjugation the verb through all its forms....
(maybe only one, such as the infinitive in English). When a verb cannot be conjugated straightforwardly like this, it is said to be irregular

Irregular verb

In contrast to regular verbs, irregular verbs are those verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of grammatical conjugation in the languages in which they occur....
. Typically the principal parts are the root

Root (linguistics)

The root is the primary lexicology unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantics 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, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
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

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a Language family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau , Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent ....
usually inflect

Inflection

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as grammatical tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, grammatical aspect, grammatical person, grammatical number, grammatical gender, grammatical 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, indicative mood, active voice, in English

English language

German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
, Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic languages spoken by over 22 million people as a first language, and about 5 million people as a second language."1% of the EU population claims to speak Dutch well enough in order to have a conversation." Outside the European Union the number of second language speakers of Dutch is very small. Most native...
, Afrikaans

Afrikaans

Afrikaans is an Indo-European language, derived from Dutch language and thus classified as Low Franconian languages West Germanic languages. It is mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia, with smaller numbers of speakers living in Botswana, Angola, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Zambia, Australia, New Zealand, United States of America, Taiwa...
, Icelandic

Icelandic language

Icelandic is a North Germanic languages, the language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese language and Norwegian dialects such as Telemark dialect and Sognam?l....
, Swedish

Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic languages language, spoken by around 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the ?land islands....
, Latvian

Latvian language

Latvian is the official state language of Latvia. Alternative names include Lettish and Lettisch. There are about 1.5 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad....
, Bulgarian

Bulgarian language

Bulgarian is an Indo-European languages, a member of the Slavic languages linguistic group.Bulgarian demonstrates several linguistic innovations that set it apart from all other Slavic languages except Macedonian language, such as the elimination of grammatical case, the development of a suffixed definite article , the lack of a verb infin...
, Serbo-Croatian

Serbo-Croatian

The Serbo-Croatian language or Croato-Serbian language is a South Slavic language diasystem. The Serbo-Croatian language was used as an umbrella term for dialects spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina; it was one of the official languages of Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1991 ....
, Polish

Polish language

Polish , an official language of Poland, has the largest number of speakers of any West Slavic languages. Polish-speakers use the language in a uniform manner through most of Poland, and it has a regular orthography....
, Hindi

Hindi

Standard Hindi, also known as High Hindi, Nagari Hindi or Literary Hindi is a Standard language register of Hindi. It is one of the 22 official languages of India, and is used, along with English language, for administration of the central government....
, Persian

Persian language

Latin

French language

French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
, Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance languages spoken by about 63 million people as a first language, primarily in Italy. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four Linguistic geography of Switzerlands....
, Spanish

Spanish language

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and Portugal. It is derived from the Latin language spoken by the Romanization Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 years ago....
, Albanian

Albanian language

Albanian is an Indo-European languages spoken by nearly 6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including the west of the Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, and southern Serbia....
, Armenian

Armenian language

The 'Armenian language' is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenians. It is the official language of the Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh....
, Ancient Attic Greek and Modern Greek

Modern Greek

Modern Greek refers the varieties of Greek 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 modern features of the language had been present centuries earli...
. This is usually the most irregular verb. You may notice the similarities in corresponding verb forms. Some of the conjugations may be disused, like the English thou
Thou

The word thou is a grammatical person grammatical number pronoun in English language. It is now largely archaism, having been replaced in almost all contexts by you....
-form, or have additional meanings, like the English you
You

You is the grammatical personpersonal pronoun in Modern English. Ye was the original nominative form; the oblique/objective form is you , and the possessive is your or yours....
-form, which can also stand for 2nd. person singular, or be impersonal

Generic you

In English grammar, generic you or indefinite you is the use of the pronoun you to refer to an placeholder name. One is the use of one in the same way....
.

|"To be" in several Indo-European languages
Branch	Germanic						Italic
Language	English	German	Dutch	Afrikaans	Icelandic	Swedish	Latin	Italian	French	Spanish	Portuguese	Romanian
Infinitive	to be	sein	zijn	wees	vera	vara	esse	essere	être	ser	ser	fi
I (1st. sing.)	am	bin	ben	is	er	är	sum	sono	suis	soy	sou	sunt
thou (2nd. sing.)	art¹	bist	ben(t)/zijt¹²	is	ert	är	es	sei	es	eres	és	e?ti
he/she/it (3rd. sing.)	is	ist	is	is	er	är	est	è	est	es	é	este
we (1st. plur.)	are	sind	zijn	is	erum	är (äro¹)	sumus	siamo	sommes	somos	somos	suntem
you (2nd. plur.)	are	seid	zijn/zijt¹²	is	eruð	är (äro¹)	estis	siete	êtes	sois	sois	sunte?i
they (3rd. plur.)	are	sind	zijn	is	eru	är (äro¹)	sunt	sono	sont	son	são	sunt

Branch	Greek		Albanian	Armenian⁹	Slavic				Baltic		Indo-Iranian
Language	Ancient (Attic)²	Modern³	Albanian	Armenian⁹	Polish	Serbo-Croatian⁴	Bulgarian⁵	Macedonian¹³	Latvian	Lithuanian	Persian	Hindi
Infinitive	eînai	(eínai)⁷	none⁸	ellal¹⁰/linel¹¹	byc	biti	(biti)¹	e	but	buti	budan	hona
I (1st. sing.)	eimí	eímai	jam	em	jestem	jesam, sam	sam	sum	esmu	esu	hastam, -am	huu
thou (2nd. sing.)	eî	eísai	je	es	jestes	jesi, si	si	si	esi	esi	hasti, -i	hai
he/she/it (3rd. sing.)	estí	eínai	është/asht⁶	e	jest	jest(e), je	e	e	ir	yra	hast, ast, -e	hai
we (1st. plur.)	esmén	eímaste	jemi	enk‘	jestesmy	jesmo, smo	sme	sme	esam	esame	hastim, -im	hãi
you (2nd. plur.)	esté	eíste	jeni	ek‘¹⁰, ek‘¹¹	jestescie	jeste, ste	ste	ste	esat	esate	hastid, -id	ho
they (3rd. plur.)	eisí	eínai	janë	en	sa	jesu, su	sa	se	ir	yra	hastand, -and	hãi

¹ Disused in the modern language.

² The verbs have been transliterated, to facilitate the comparison with other languages. In the Greek alphabet, they are written as follows, from top to bottom: , , , , , , .

³ The verbs have been transliterated, to facilitate the comparison with other languages. In the Greek alphabet, they are written as follows, from top to bottom: e?µa?, e?sa?, e??a?, e?µaste, e?ste, e??a?.

⁴ The verbs have been transliterated, to facilitate the comparison with other languages. In the Cyrillic alphabet, they are written as follows, from top to bottom: ????, ?????/???, ????/??, ????(?)/??, ?????/???, ?????/???, ????/??. The latter forms are clitic

Clitic

In linguistics, a clitic is a grammatically independent and phonology dependent word. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level....
s.

⁵ The verbs have been transliterated, to facilitate the comparison with other languages. In the Cyrillic alphabet, they are written as follows, from top to bottom: ????, ???, ??, ?, ???, ???, ??.

⁶ In the Tosk and Geg dialects, respectively.

⁷ Used as a noun ("being, existence").

⁸ Ptc: qenë.

⁹ The verbs have been transliterated, to facilitate the comparison with other languages. In the Armenian alphabet, they are written as follows, from top to bottom: ??, ??, ?, ???, ??¹⁰/??¹¹, ??

¹⁰Denotes Western Armenian forms

¹¹Denotes Eastern Armenian forms

¹²In Flemish dialects.

¹³ The verbs have been transliterated, to facilitate the comparison with other languages. In the Cyrillic alphabet, they are written as follows, from top to bottom: ?, ???, ??, ?, ???, ???, ??.

Verbal agreement

Verbal agreement or concord is a morpho

Morphology (linguistics)

Morphology is the identification, analysis and description of structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules....
-syntactic

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
construct in which properties of the subject

Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituent every sentence can be divided into, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle....
and/or object

Object (grammar)

An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence Predicate . It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb....
s of a verb

Verb

Agreement (linguistics)

In languages, agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when one word changes in form depending on to which other words it is being related....
with their subjects (resp. objects).

Many English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
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 language

Morphology (linguistics)

T-V distinction

In sociolinguistics, a T-V distinction describes the situation wherein a language has Grammatical person pronouns that distinguish 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 people poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist....
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 or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
, for instance, certain 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 a language of the Northwest Caucasian languages, spoken by the Ubykh people up until the early 1990s.The word is derived from , its name in the Abdzakh Adyghe language language....
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 language spoken by the Basque people who inhabit the Pyrenees in North-Central Spain and the adjoining region of South-Western France....
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 digute means "they brought us the car" (neuter agreement for listener), but autoa zigunate 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 as well.

Factors that affect conjugation

Common grammatical categories

Grammatical category

A grammatical category or functional category is a linguistic term encompassing, among other things:*Animacy*Countability *Definiteness ...
according to which verbs can be conjugated are the following:

Finite verb forms
Finite verb

A finite verb is a verb that is Inflection for grammatical person and for grammatical tense according to the rules and categories of the languages in which it occurs....
:

Grammatical person
Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deixis 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 number
Grammatical number

In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender

In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once....
Grammatical tense
Grammatical tense

Grammatical tense is a temporal language quality expressing the time at, during, or over which a state or action denoted by a verb occurs.Tense is one of at least five qualities, along with grammatical mood, grammatical voice, grammatical aspect, and grammatical person, which verb forms may express....
Grammatical aspect
Grammatical aspect

In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb defines the temporal flow in the described event or state. In English, for example, the past-tense sentences "I swam" and "I was swimming" differ in aspect ....
Grammatical mood
Grammatical mood

Grammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive verb forms that are used to signal Linguistic modality.It is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although these concepts are conflated to some degree in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages, insofar as the same word patterns are used...
Grammatical voice
Grammatical voice

In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its verb arguments ....

Non-finite verb 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 inflection by categories that are marked inflectionally in language, such as grammatical tense, grammatical aspect, grammatical mood, grammatical number, grammatical gender, and grammatical person....
.

Other factors which may affect conjugation are:

Degree of formality (see T-V distinction
T-V distinction

In sociolinguistics, a T-V distinction describes the situation wherein a language has Grammatical person pronouns that distinguish varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee....
, Honorific speech in Japanese)
Inclusiveness and exclusiveness in the 1st. person plural
Clusivity

In linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive Grammatical person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we"....
Transitivity
Transitivity (grammatical category)

In linguistics, transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects. It is closely related to valency ....
Valency
Valency (linguistics)

In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of verb argument controlled by a verbal predicate . It is related, though not identical, to transitive verb, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate....

Grammatical conjugation

Examples

Verbal agreement

Factors that affect conjugation

See also

Conjugations by language

Related topics

External links