Hindi verbs are highly inflected in comparison to English, but markedly simple in comparison to Sanskrit, from which Hindi has inherited its verbal conjugation system. Verbs in Hindi conjugate according to mood, tense, person and number. Aspect-marking participles in Hindi mark the aspect. Gender is not distinct in the present tense of indicative mood, however, all the participle form of verbs are agrees with the gender and number of the subject. Verbs in Hindi agree with the gender of the subject or the object depending on whether the subject pronoun is in the dative or ergative case or the direct case.
Overview
Verbs
In Hindi, all the verbs have a base form called the infinitive which is marked by the -nā ending of verbs.
Complex Verbs
Hindi is extremely rich in complex verbs which are formed by the combinations of noun/adjective and a verb. Complex verbs are of two types: transitive and intransitive.
The transitive verbs are obtained by combining nouns/adjectives with verbs such as karnā ‘to do’, lenā ‘to take’, denā ‘to give’, jītnā ‘to win’ etc.
The intransitive verbs are formed with the help of verbs such as honā ‘to be/happen’, lagnā ‘to feel’, ānā ‘to come’ etc.
Complex verbs are of the combination:
Noun + Verb
Adjective + Verb
Verb + Verb
Verb + Verb + Verb
Verb + Verb + Verb + Verb
where the noun, adjective or the first verb contributes the semantic content and the verb or second verb accounts for the syntactic information of the construction. Noun/adjective and verb combinations are termed conjunct verbs, as in and in the examples below whereas the combinations of two verbs are called compound verbs, as in the example below. Examplesː kām karnā → kiyā sāf karnā → sāf kiyā ' bol denā → bol diyā ' bol diyā jānā → bol diyā gayā bol diyā gayā honā → bol diyā gayā hai In the above five example sentences, there are five types of Hindi verbal constructions which can be grouped into two categories of complex verbs in Hindi, namely, conjunct verbs and compound verbs. and are examples of conjunct verbs since in we find a noun kām ‘work’ and a perfective form of the verb karnā, ‘do’ whereas in the verbal predicate exhibits a complex construction made of two elements, namely an adjective sāf ‘clean’ plus a verb karnā, ‘do’. The example in, and, on the other hand, are considered be compound verbs as their predicates exhibit two or more than two verbal elements, for, bol ‘tell’ and denā ‘give’, for bol 'tell' diyā 'gave' jānā 'go', for bol 'tell' diyā 'gave' gayā 'went' honā 'be'.
Irregular Verbs
There are very few irregular verbs. There are two types of irregularities in Hindi verbs, which are:
Irregular preterite forms of the verbs above are given in the table below: Note:
The suffixes remain regular, but only the verb stem changes.
-- represents that it is optional to put the semi-vowel "y".
Note:
There is no 2nd person intimate plural pronoun in Hindi.
Present indicative and present subjunctive forms exist only for the copula verbhonā and do not exist for all other verbs. However, present subjunctive forms of other verbs can be formed in their participle forms because they employ the verb honā as the copula.
Aspects
There are three primary aspects in Hindi: Habitual Aspect, Perfective Aspect and Progressive Aspect. Periphrastic Hindi verb forms consist of two elements, the first of these two elements is the aspect marker and the second element is the tense-mood marker. These three aspects are formed from their participle forms being used with the copula verb of Hindi. However, the primary participles which mark the aspects can be modified periphrastically by adding auxiliary participles constructed from auxiliary verbs of Hindi such as rehnā, ānā, jānā after the primary participle to add a nuance to the aspect.
Moods
There are five moods in which the three aspects of Hindi can be put into. Moods in Hindi are mentioned below:
When making an if-sentence, the conditional mood is used in both apodosis and the protasis unlike other languages such as the ones in the Romance branch which make use of unique past-subjunctive and conditional verb forms in the apodosis and the protasis, respectively.
The difference between the present and the future subjunctive exists only for the copula verb honā in Hindi and for all other verbs they have a common form.
Participles
There are two types of participles in Hindi, aspectual participles which mark the aspect and non-aspectual participles which do not mark aspect. In the table below which mentions the different participles present in Hindi, ɸ denotes the verb root. The verb root ɸ for non-complex verbs is a single root however for complex verbs ɸ is in the form of ɸ1 + ɸ2 where ɸ2 acts like ɸ of the non-complex verbs which is declinable according to the aspect, for example, for the verb karnā the root is kar and for the complex verb kar jānā the root is "kar jā-" where ɸ1 = kar and ɸ2 = jā. Note:
ɸ-ā denotes that when the verb root ends in the vowels "e" and "i" then the "y" can optionally be included, however, of the verb stem ends in the vowels "a", "o", & "u" or a consonant, then the "y" must be included in the suffix.
the participles which do not end in the vowel ā in their masculine singular form are cannot be declined according to gender or number, for example, the oblique infinitive and the progressive participle end in the vowel -ē and hence have the same form for all gender and number combinations. Also, usually such participles do not take in the copula after them but instead a verb.
Some examples of participle forms for different verbs are shown in the table belowː Notesː
Infinitive/Dative participles always use the dative pronouns as subjects, while all others have direct-case pronouns as subjects.
the postposition '-se' in this context above conveys reason when attached with an oblique infinitive.
