The term finite is derived from Latin: finitus (past participle of finire – "to put an end to, bound, limit")[2] as the form "to which number and person appertain".
Under the first of those constructions, finite verbs often denote grammatical characteristics such as gender, person, number, tense, aspect, mood, modality, and voice.
For example, in the Latin sentence cogito ergo sum ("I think therefore I am") the finite verbs cogito and sum appear without an explicit subject – the subject is understood to be the first-person personal pronoun, and this information is marked by the way the verbs are inflected.
In English, finite verbs lacking subjects are normal in imperative sentences: And also occur in some fragmentary utterances with an elliptical subject: The relatively limited system of inflectional morphology in English often obscures the central role of finite verbs.
The other four categories serve to situate the clause content according to time in relation to the speaker (tense), extent to which the action, occurrence, or state is complete (aspect), assessment of reality or desired reality (mood), and relation of the subject to the action or state (voice).
Highly inflected languages like Latin and Russian, however, frequently express most or even all of the categories in one finite verb.
Finite verbs play a particularly important role in syntactic analyses of sentence structure.
[6] Many of the details of the trees are not important for the point at hand, but they show clearly that the finite verb (in bold each time) is the structural center of the clause.