Konjugatsiooni

Konjugatsiooni (conjugation) is the linguistic process by which verbs are inflected to encode grammatical information. In most languages this involves changing the verb form to indicate the subject (person and number), the time of the action (tense), and the mood (for example indicative, subjunctive, or imperative). Additional distinctions may include aspect, voice, negation, and modality, depending on the language.

Conjugation can be synthetic, by affixes attached to the verb stem, or analytic, by using auxiliary verbs and word order. Some languages mix these strategies. The complete set of verb forms for a given verb is called its paradigm or conjugation paradigm; irregular verbs deviate from the regular pattern and require special forms.

Common grammatical categories encoded by conjugation include person (first, second, third), number (singular, plural), tense (past, present, future), mood (indicative, subjunctive/conditional, imperative), aspect (perfective, imperfective), and voice (active, passive). Some languages also encode polarity, evidentiality, or modality within verb forms. The details vary widely across languages: richly inflected systems exist in many Romance and Slavic languages, while some analytic languages rely more on auxiliary verbs and fixed word order to express temporal or modal distinctions.

Conjugation is a central topic in morphology and language teaching, and its study helps explain how languages change over time and how speakers construct meaningful sentences from finite verb inventories.