verbformability

Verbformability refers to the inherent capacity of a language's verbal system to generate a wide array of distinct word forms. This capacity is largely determined by the number and types of morphological processes available to modify verbs. Languages with high verbformability typically possess rich inflectional systems, allowing verbs to change their form to indicate tense, aspect, mood, person, number, and sometimes gender or case. For instance, highly inflected languages might have separate verb endings for each grammatical person and number, as well as different forms for past, present, and future tenses, and various moods like indicative, subjunctive, and imperative.

Conversely, languages with low verbformability tend to rely more heavily on auxiliary verbs, adverbs, or syntactic constructions to convey grammatical information that might be expressed morphologically in other languages. Their verbs may have fewer inflectional endings, or perhaps none at all. The concept is related to morphological complexity, but specifically focuses on the verbal domain. It's not about the ease with which a speaker can learn these forms, but rather the structural potential of the verb system itself to produce variations. Different linguistic theories may define or measure verbformability in slightly different ways, but the core idea remains the systematic modification of the verb base to express grammatical nuances.