verbconjugation

Verb conjugation is the process by which verbs change form to encode grammatical information such as person, number, tense, aspect, mood, and voice. In many languages these changes affect the verb stem or its endings, producing a paradigm of finite forms derived from an infinitive. Some languages rely on rich inflection, typical of Romance, Slavic, and Semitic families; others use analytic systems that combine auxiliary verbs with relatively fixed word order, as in English or Mandarin. In languages that permit subject omission (pro-drop), the verb form often signals the person and number independently of a stated subject.

Conjugation organizes these forms into paradigms that a given verb may take across tenses and moods. Changes can be suffixal, prefixal, internal vowel alterations, or irregular, and some verbs display a mix of regular rules with exceptions. Tense and aspect mark time and completion; mood expresses attitude toward what is stated (for example indicative, subjunctive, imperative); voice marks whether the action is active, passive, or middle. Person and number often agree with the subject, though many languages also encode formality or politeness in verb forms. Examples: English to walk yields I walk, you walk, he walks; past tense walked; future will walk. Spanish hablar yields hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan; preterite hablé, comí; imperfect hablaba; subjunctive hable.

Irregularities and more complex variants are common. Some verbs undergo stem changes or vowel alternations (for example go/went); others use suppletion where an entirely different verb form is used for a tense. Certain languages rely heavily on auxiliary constructions to express tense, aspect, or mood, rather than inflecting the main verb alone. The study of conjugation intersects with syntax and morphology and varies widely across languages, influencing language learning, translation, and linguistic description.