konjugatív

Konjugatív is an adjective used in linguistics to describe aspects of verb inflection, or conjugation. It refers to the system by which verbs change form to encode grammatical categories such as person, number, tense, mood, voice, and aspect. A konjugatív language typically presents verbs in a paradigm, a fixed set of forms that encode subject-related information. Affixes applied to the verb stem can be suffixes, prefixes, infixes, or internal alternations, and languages may use fusional, agglutinative, or mixed morphologies.

In practice, konjugatív description focuses on the inflectional endings and stem changes that mark different forms of the same verb. For example, in a Spanish-style konjugatív system, hablar yields hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan, illustrating person and number marking across tenses. In English, while conjugation exists, it is comparatively limited, and many forms rely on periphrasis rather than inflection.

The term is often used in contrast with derivational morphology (creation of new words) or with non-conjugating word classes. Some grammars distinguish a verb's "conjugation class" or "conjugation paradigm" as a formal listing of all forms, while others analyze person-number agreement at the clause level.

See also: Conjugation (linguistics), Verb morphology, Inflection, Paradigm, Agreement.