Grammatical conjugation
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection. Verbs may inflect for grammatical categories such as person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, case, possession, definiteness, politeness, causativity, clusivity, interrogativity, transitivity, valency, polarity, telicity, volition, mirativity, evidentiality, animacy, associativity, pluractionality, and reciprocity. Verbs may also be affected by agreement, polypersonal agreement, incorporation, noun class, noun classifiers, and verb classifiers. Agglutinative and polysynthetic languages tend to have the most complex conjugations albeit some fusional languages such as Archi can also have extremely complex conjugation. Typically the principal parts are the root and/or several modifications of it. All the different forms of the same verb constitute a lexeme, and the canonical form of the verb that is conventionally used to represent that lexeme is called a lemma.
The term conjugation is applied only to the inflection of verbs, and not of other parts of speech. Also it is often restricted to denoting the formation of finite forms of a verb – these may be referred to as conjugated forms, as opposed to non-finite forms, such as the infinitive or gerund, which tend not to be marked for most of the grammatical categories.
Conjugation is also the traditional name for a group of verbs that share a similar conjugation pattern in a particular language. For example, Latin is said to have 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. A verb that does not follow all of the standard conjugation patterns of the language is said to be an irregular verb. The system of all conjugated variants of a particular verb or class of verbs is called a verb paradigm; this may be presented in the form of a conjugation table.
Examples
usually inflect verbs for several grammatical categories in complex paradigms, although some, like English, have simplified verb conjugation to a large extent. Below is the conjugation of the verb to be in the present tense, in English, German, Yiddish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Icelandic, Faroese, Swedish, Norwegian, Latvian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Slovenian, Macedonian, Urdu or Hindi, Persian, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Albanian, Armenian, Irish, Ukrainian, 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.Verbal agreement
Verbal agreement, or concord, is a morpho-syntactic construct in which properties of the subject and/or objects of a verb are indicated by the verb form. Verbs are then said to agree with their subjects.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. A few English verbs have no special forms that indicate subject agreement, 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, tu es, elle est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont. Historically, English used to have a similar verbal paradigm. Some historic verb forms are used by Shakespeare as slightly archaic or more formal variants 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, but in French, its close relative, they are obligatory. The Spanish equivalent to the French je suis can be simply soy. The pronoun yo in the explicit form yo soy is used only for emphasis or to clear ambiguity in complex texts.
Some languages have a richer agreement system in which verbs agree also with some or all of their objects. Ubykh exhibits verbal agreement for the subject, direct object, indirect object, benefaction and ablative objects.
Basque can show agreement not only for subject, direct object and indirect object but it also can exhibit agreement for the listener as the implicit benefactor: autoa ekarri digute means "they brought us the car", but autoa ekarri ziguten means "they brought us the car".
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, but all permutations of subject, verb and object are permitted.
Nonverbal person agreement
In some languages, predicative adjectives and copular complements receive a form of person agreement that is distinct from that used on ordinary predicative verbs. Although that 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 pronouns that have become cliticised to the nouns to which they refer. An example of nonverbal person agreement, along with contrasting verbal conjugation, can be found from Beja :- wun.tu.wi, “you are big”
- hadá.b.wa, “you are a sheik”
- e.n.fór, “he flees”
- fèmba.di, “I am a Tungus”
- dɨ.fen, “I am standing”
- koş.u.yor.sun “you are running”
- çavuş.sun “you are a sergeant”
- koş.mu.yor.sun “you are not running”
- çavuş değil.sin “you are not a sergeant”
Factors that affect conjugation
These common grammatical categories affect how verbs can be conjugated:- Finite verb forms:
- *Grammatical person
- *Grammatical number
- *Grammatical gender
- *Grammatical tense
- *Grammatical aspect
- *Grammatical mood
- *Grammatical voice
- Non-finite verb forms.
- Degree of formality
- Clusivity
- Transitivity
- Valency
Conjugation classes
Pama-Nyungan languages
One common feature of Pama–Nyungan languages, the largest family of Australian Aboriginal languages, is the notion of conjugation classes, which are a set of groups into which each lexical verb falls. They determine how a verb is conjugated for Tense–aspect–mood. The classes can but do not universally correspond to the transitivity or valency of the verb in question. Generally, of the two to six conjugation classes in a Pama-Nyungan language, two classes are open with a large membership and allow for new coinages, and the remainder are closed and of limited membership.Wati
In Wati languages, verbs generally fall into four classes:- l class
- ∅ class
- n class
- ng class
| Class | Past | Present | Future | Imperative | Past Continuous | Habitual |
| LA | -rna | -npa/-rni | -nku | -la | -rninya | la |
| LA | waka-rna | waka-rni | waka-nku | waka-la | waka-rninya | waka-la |
| LA | speared | is spearing | will spear | spear it! | used to spear | spears |
| YA | -nya | -manyi | -ku | -∅/-ya | -minya | -∅/-ya |
| YA | wanti-nya | wanti-manyi | wanti-ku | wanti-ya | wanti-minya | wanti-ya |
| YA | stayed | is staying | will stay | stay! | used to stay | stays |
| RRA | -na | -npa | -nku | -rra | -ninya | -rra |
| RRA | ya-na | ya-npa | ya-nku | ya-rra | ya-ninya | ya-rra |
| RRA | went | is going | will go | go! | used to go | goes |
| WA | -nya | -nganyi | -ngku | -wa | -nganyinya | -wa |
| WA | pi-nya | pi-nganyi | pi-ngku | pi-wa | pi-nganyinya | pi-wa |
| WA | hit | is hitting | will hit | hit it! | used to hit | hits |
See also a similar table of verb classes and conjugations in Pitjantjatjara, a Wati language wherein the correlating verb classes are presented below also by their imperative verbal endings -la, -∅, -ra and -wa respectively
| Class | Past | Present | Future | Imperative | Past Continuous | Habitual |
| LA | -nu | -ni | -lku | -la | -ningi | -lpai |
| LA | kati-nu | kati-ni | kati-leu | kati-la | kati-ningi | kati-lpai |
| LA | took | is taking | will take | take it! | used to take | takes |
| ∅ | -ngu | -nyi | -ku | -∅ | -ngi | -pai |
| ∅ | tawa-ngu | tawa-nyi | tawa-ku | tawa-∅ | tawa-ngi | tawa-pai |
| ∅ | dug | is digging | will dig | dig! | used to dig | digs |
| RA | -nu | -nangi | -nkuku | -ra | -nangi | -nkupai |
| RA | a-nu | a-nangi | a-nkuku | a-ra | a-nangi | a-nkupai |
| RA | went | is going | will go | go! | used to go | goes |
| WA | -ngu | -nganyi | -nguku | -wa | -ngangi | -ngkupai |
| WA | pu-ngu | pu-nganyi | pu-nguku | pu-wa | pu-ngangi | pu-ngkupai |
| WA | hit | is hitting | will hit | hit it! | used to hit | hits |
Ngayarta
, a member of the Ngayarda sub-family of languages has a binary conjugation system labelled:- l class
- ∅ class
| Class | Present | Remote Past | Past | Past Continuous | Habitual | Future | Speculative | Purposive | Optative | Present Contrafactual | Past Contrafactual | Anticipatory |
| L | ||||||||||||
| L | jaa-rri | jaa-rnta | jaa-rnu | jaa-yinyu | jaa-yirnta | jaa-n | jaa-mpi | jaa-lu | jaa-nmara | jaa-rrima | jaa-nmarnta | jaa-rnmarta |
| L | is chopping | chopped | chopped | used to chop | chops | will chop | could have chopped | in order to chop | ought to chop | were x chopping | had x chopped | should x chop |
| ∅ | ||||||||||||
| ∅ | warni-yan | warni-rnta | warni-nyu | warni-yanu | warni-yanta | warni-Ø | warni-rnpi | warni-kura | warni-mara | warni-yanma | warni-marnta | warni-nyamarta |
| ∅ | is falling | fell | fell | used to fall | falls | will fall | could have fallen | in order to fall | ought to fall | were x falling | had x fallen | should x fall |
These classes even extend to how verbs are nominalized as instruments with the l-class verb including the addition of an /l/ before the nominalizing suffix and the blank class remaining blank:
l-class example:
∅-class example
Yidiny
has a ternary verb class system with two open classes and one closed class. Verbs are classified as:- -n class
- -l class
- -r class
| Class | imperative | Present/Future | Past | Purposive | Apprehensive |
| N | -n | -ng | -nyu | -na | -ntyi |
| N | nyina-n | nyina-ng | nyina-nyu | nyina-na | nyina-ntyi |
| N | sit! | is sitting / will sit | sat | in order to sit | lest x sit |
| L | -∅ | -l | -lnyu | -lna | -ltyi |
| L | patya-∅ | patya-l | patya-lnyu | patya-lna | patya-ltyi |
| L | bite it! | is biting / will bite | bit | in order to bite | lest x bite |
| R | -rr | -r | -rnyu | -rna | -rtyi |
| R | pakya-rr | pakya-r | pakya-rnyu | -pakya-rna | pakya-rtyi |
| R | feel sore! | is feeling / will feel sore | felt sore | in order to feel sore | lest x feel sore |
Conjugations by language
- :Category:Grammatical conjugation
- Indo-European copula