verbalform

Verbalform, or verb form, refers to a specific morphosyntactic realization of a verb used to encode grammatical information. Verbs may appear in a range of forms that convey tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number, as well as syntactic role in a clause. Forms are often categorized as finite (constrained by subject and time) or non-finite (not marked for tense and typically lacking a subject). In many languages, verbs also require auxiliary verbs or particles to express additional meaning.

Finite forms are those that function as the main predicate of a clause and agree with the subject in person and number in many languages. They express time and modality through tense, mood, and sometimes aspect. Non-finite forms do not show tense on their own and include infinitives, participles, and gerunds or supines in some languages. These non-finite forms commonly serve as parts of compound tenses, passive constructions, or as modifiers and non-clausal heads in subordinate clauses.

How verbal forms are organized varies by language. English, for example, has base forms like walk, third-person singular walks, past walked, present participle walking, and past participle walked, plus the infinitive to walk. Other languages exhibit extensive inflectional paradigms, with verb conjugations mapping to person, number, tense, mood, aspect, voice, and sometimes gender or case in agreement. The study of verbal forms intersects morphology, syntax, and historical linguistics, helping describe how languages encode time, action, and agreement through verbs.