konjugointI

Konjugointi is the set of systematic changes that verbs undergo to express grammatical categories within a sentence. In many languages it involves inflecting verbs for person and number, tense or aspect, mood, voice, negation, and modality. Changes can be suffixes or prefixes attached to the verb stem, alterations to the stem itself, or the use of auxiliary verbs (periphrasis). Finite verb forms are the ones used in main clauses, while non-finite forms include infinitives, participles and related constructions.

Most languages organize verbs into conjugation classes or paradigms, each with its own regular pattern of endings. Regular conjugations yield predictable forms, whereas irregular verbs deviate from those patterns and must be learned separately. Some languages rely heavily on auxiliary verbs to express tense or aspect, creating periphrastic conjugations.

Finnish: konjugointi refers to inflecting verbs to express person and number in finite forms, and to mark tense, mood, and aspect through endings and auxiliary constructions. The language uses a rich set of participles and a passive voice, and negation is formed with a separate negative particle plus the main verb in a non-finite form. Finnish verbs also generate non-finite forms used to connect clauses or express modality and intention.

Across languages, conjugation shapes how meaning is encoded in verb phrases and influences word order and syntactic structure. It interacts with morphology, syntax, and semantics, and varies from highly inflected systems to more analytic ones. See also morphology, inflection, and verb.