The preterite or preterit is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense. In general, it combines the perfective aspect with the past tense and may thus also be termed the perfective past. In grammars of particular languages the preterite is sometimes called the past historic, or the aorist. When the term "preterite" is used in relation to specific languages, it may not correspond precisely to this definition. In English it can be used to refer to the simple past verb form, which sometimes expresses perfective aspect. The case of German is similar: the Präteritum is the simple (non-compound) past tense, which does not always imply perfective aspect, and is anyway often replaced by the Perfekt even in perfective past meanings.
The subjunctive is a grammatical mood, a feature of the utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude toward it. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as: wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used vary from language to language. The subjunctive is one of the irrealis moods, which refer to what is not necessarily real. It is often contrasted with the indicative, a realis mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact.
Spanish verbs form one of the more complex areas of Spanish grammar. Spanish is a relatively synthetic language with a moderate to high degree of inflection, which shows up mostly in Spanish conjugation.
Spanish is a grammatically inflected language, which means that many words are modified ("marked") in small ways, usually at the end, according to their changing functions. Verbs are marked for tense, aspect, mood, person, and number. Nouns follow a two-gender system and are marked for number. Personal pronouns are inflected for person, number, gender, and a very reduced case system; the Spanish pronominal system represents a simplification of the ancestral Latin system.
The imperfect is a verb form that combines past tense and imperfective aspect. It can have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to walk". It contrasts with preterite forms, which refer to a single completed event in the past.
In Spanish grammar, voseo is the use of vos as a second-person singular pronoun, along with its associated verbal forms, in certain regions where the language is spoken. In those regions it replaces tuteo, i.e. the use of the pronoun tú and its verbal forms. Voseo can also be found in the context of using verb conjugations for vos with tú as the subject pronoun, as in the case of Chilean Spanish, where this form coexists with the ordinary form of voseo.
In language learning, the principal parts of a verb are those forms that a student must memorize in order to be able to conjugate the verb through all its forms. The concept originates in the humanist Latin schools, where students learned verbs by chanting them in the four key forms from which all other forms can be deduced, for example:
In French, a verb is inflected to reflect its mood and tense, as well as to agree with its subject in person and number. Following the tradition of Latin grammar, the set of inflected forms of a French verb is called the verb's conjugation.
This article presents a set of paradigms—that is, conjugation tables—of Spanish verbs, including examples of regular verbs and some of the most common irregular verbs. For other irregular verbs and their common patterns, see the article on Spanish irregular verbs.
The English language has many irregular verbs, approaching 200 in normal use—and significantly more if prefixed forms are counted. In most cases, the irregularity concerns the past tense or the past participle.
French conjugation refers to the variation in the endings of French verbs (inflections) depending on the person, tense and mood. Most verbs are regular and can be entirely determined by their infinitive form however irregular verbs require the knowledge of more than just the infinitive form known as the principal parts of which there are seven in French. With the knowledge of these seven principal parts of a verb one can conjugate almost all French verbs. However, a handful of verbs, including être, are highly irregular and the seven principal parts are not sufficient to conjugate the verb fully.
Central American Spanish is the general name of the Spanish language dialects spoken in Central America. More precisely, the term refers to the Spanish language as spoken in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Panamanian Spanish is considered a variety of Caribbean Spanish, it is transitional between Central American and Caribbean dialects.
The future perfect is a verb form or construction used to describe an event that is expected or planned to happen before a time of reference in the future, such as will have finished in the English sentence "I will have finished by tomorrow." It is a grammatical combination of the future tense, or other marking of future time, and the perfect, a grammatical aspect that views an event as prior and completed.
Romance verbs are the most inflected part of speech in the language family. In the transition from Latin to the Romance languages, verbs went through many phonological, syntactic, and semantic changes. Most of the distinctions present in classical Latin continued to be made, but synthetic forms were often replaced with more analytic ones. Other verb forms changed meaning, and new forms also appeared.
Old Norse has three categories of verbs and two categories of nouns. Conjugation and declension are carried out by a mix of inflection and two nonconcatenative morphological processes: umlaut, a backness-based alteration to the root vowel; and ablaut, a replacement of the root vowel, in verbs.
This article discusses the conjugation of verbs in a number of varieties of Catalan, including Old Catalan. Each verbal form is accompanied by its phonetic transcription. Widely used dialectal forms are included, even if they are not considered standard in either of the written norms: those of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans and the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua. Other dialectal forms exist, including those characteristic of minor dialects such as Ribagorçan and Algherese and transitional forms of major dialects.
Portuguese verbs display a high degree of inflection. A typical regular verb has over fifty different forms, expressing up to six different grammatical tenses and three moods. Two forms are peculiar to Portuguese within the Romance languages:
A regular verb is any verb whose conjugation follows the typical pattern, or one of the typical patterns, of the language to which it belongs. A verb whose conjugation follows a different pattern is called an irregular verb. This is one instance of the distinction between regular and irregular inflection, which can also apply to other word classes, such as nouns and adjectives.
This article is about the phonology and phonetics of the Galician language.
The conjugation of Sardinian verbs are mainly divided according to infinitives into -are, -ere, and -ire verbs in north-central dialects for regular verbs, similar to the tripartite systems of Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. In southern dialects, these infinitives above change to -ai, -i, and -iri, respectively. Irregular verbs also exist as well. Many Sardinian conjugated forms were similar and conservative phonologically to Classical Latin, although the number of tenses were greatly reduced and the remaining tenses rely on periphrasis.
