verbitermi

Verbitermi is a term encountered in some linguistic and typological discussions to denote a class of verbal morphemes whose primary function is to encode information about the verb's argument structure and related grammatical categories within the verb ending itself. The construction blends Latin roots verbi- "of the verb" and termini "endings," and the term is used to draw attention to cases where verbal morphology carries multiple layers of meaning that might otherwise be expressed with auxiliary words or separate nouns.

In practice, verbitermi refers to inflectional endings or sequences that mark agreement with arguments (subject, object) and other features such as tense, aspect, mood, voice, evidentiality, or modality. In languages with rich verbal systems, a single verbiterm may signal several of these categories at once. However, the label is not standardized and its exact scope varies among authors, making it more of a descriptive umbrella than a fixed grammatical category.

Typological discussions often use the concept of verbitermi to compare languages with dense verb-internal coding to those relying more on auxiliary constructions or independent function words. The notion helps illustrate how morphological economies can compactly encode complex grammatical information, but it also raises questions about cross-linguistic comparability and terminological clarity.

Critics argue that verbitermi can be too broad or ambiguous, potentially masking distinct morphosyntactic phenomena under a single label. When used, it is common to supplement the term with more precise descriptions of the feature sets involved, such as suffixal morphology, agreement prefixes, or explicit feature bundles describing tense, aspect, and argument structure. See also: verb morphology, inflection, grammaticalization, evidentiality, agreement.