Conjugazione

Conjugazione, or conjugation, is the process by which verbs change form to express grammatical categories such as person, number, tense, mood, voice, and aspect. In many languages, verbs belong to conjugation classes or patterns that determine the typical endings attached to a stem. Regular verbs follow predictable endings, while irregular verbs involve stem changes or irregular forms.

In Italian, there are three main conjugation classes: -are, -ere, and -ire. For parlare (to speak) in the present indicative you get: io parlo, tu parli, lui/lei parla, noi parliamo, voi parlate, loro parlano. Other tenses add further endings, and some verbs are irregular, such as essere and avere.

Conjugation also encodes tense, mood, voice, and aspect. Tenses include present, past, and future; moods include indicative, subjunctive, conditional, and imperative. Voices include active and passive, with passive forms often built from auxiliary verbs plus participles in many languages.

Across languages, conjugation patterns vary. Latin had four main conjugations; Spanish, French, and Italian use Romance patterns based on -ar, -er/-ir endings, with their own irregulars. In English, conjugation is less extensive, relying more on auxiliary verbs for tense and aspect.

Conjugation is central to grammar and language learning, enabling subject–verb agreement and precise expression of time and intention. It also underpins linguistic theory and computational morphology, where inflection generation and lemmatization are common tasks.