Conjugaison

Conjugaison refers to the set of inflectional changes through which verbs express grammatical categories such as person and number, tense, mood, and voice. It is a central component of verbal morphology in many languages, enabling agreement with subjects and encoding the speaker’s stance toward the event. While the specifics differ, the general aim is to derive distinct verb forms from a common lemma.

In French, the term conjugaison denotes the systematic variation of verb forms. French verbs are traditionally categorized into three conjugations by infinitive endings: -er, -ir, -re, though many irregular verbs navigate their own patterns. Regular and irregular forms cover present, past, and future tenses, as well as compound tenses that use auxiliary verbs such as être or avoir. The language also distinguishes moods—indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and conditional—and uses different forms to express voice, chiefly active and, less commonly, passive constructions.

French conjugation combines endings, stem changes, and orthographic adjustments. Regular conjugation follows predictable endings, while irregular verbs show stem changes and irregular endings. Spelling adjustments preserve pronunciation in certain forms (for example, -ger verbs yield nous mangeons). Some verbs exhibit stem vowel changes or irregular themes (aller, venir, pouvoir). Learners rely on conjugation tables and rules; linguists analyze paradigms to study verb systems, and computational tools parse or generate verb forms for language processing tasks.

Example present indicative forms: parler: je parle, tu parles, il parle, nous parlons, vous parlez, ils parlent. Avoir: j’ai, tu as, il a, nous avons, vous avez, ils ont. Être: suis, es, est, sommes, êtes, sont. Conjugaison thus underpins syntax, language learning, and natural language processing in French and related languages.