konjugasjonslike

Konjugasjonslike is a linguistic term used to describe morphological patterns that imitate verb conjugation but occur outside the traditional finite-verb paradigm. The word combines konjugasjon (conjugation) with the English suffix -like, signaling likeness rather than identity. In typological descriptions, konjugasjonslike forms are noted when a language shows finite or semi-finite inflectional behavior in forms that are not strictly verbs, or when non-verb elements participate in a conjugation-like system.

Common manifestations include: affixes on adjectives or nouns that carry person or number agreement with the subject; periphrastic constructions in which auxiliary elements pair with a non-verb to encode tense, aspect, mood, or evidentiality in a way that mirrors a verb paradigm; or clitics and particles that trigger verb-like inflection on nearby words. The key idea is parallelism: the same morphosyntactic distinctions found in verb conjugation are mapped onto other word classes or through auxiliary sequences.

The notion is primarily descriptive and used to compare languages with different morphological strategies. It helps linguists understand how languages create finite forms and how cross-category agreement can resemble traditional conjugation systems. Konjugasjonslike is not a universal category with a fixed set of forms; rather, it denotes observed likeness between seemingly different morphosyntactic systems.

Related concepts include verb morphology, agreement, inflection, conjugation, and cross-linguistic typology.