Glagoli

Glagoli, or verbs, are a core part of speech in many Slavic languages, including Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Slovenian. They denote actions, events, or states and are highly inflected, changing form to reflect grammatical features such as person, number, tense, mood, voice, and aspect. Verbs typically form the backbone of predicate structures and interact with auxiliary words to express time and reality.

A central feature of glagoli is aspect, which distinguishes completed actions (perfective) from ongoing or repeated actions (imperfective). Many verbs come in aspectual pairs, and the choice of aspect affects tense formation and meaning. In addition to aspect, glagoli mark tense in finite forms (present, past, and future in many languages) and mood, including indicative, imperative, and conditional/subjunctive. Voice, notably active and passive, may also be expressed directly or via auxiliary constructions.

Verbs have finite forms, which indicate person and number and are used in main clauses, and non-finite forms, such as infinitives, participles (present and past), and sometimes supines or gerunds, which are used to form compound tenses or to modify other verbs. Verbs also conjugate for transitivity, with some verbs taking direct objects and others being intransitive.

Glagoli are often classified by conjugation patterns, regularity, and semantic factors, including voice and aspect. They interact with other parts of speech to build complex clause structures and are essential for expressing time, manner, intention, and modality.