Grammatical conjugation

Verbs may inflect for grammatical categories such as person, number, gender, case, tense, aspect, mood, voice, possession, definiteness, politeness, causativity, clusivity, interrogatives, transitivity, valency, polarity, telicity, volition, mirativity, evidentiality, animacy, associativity,[3] pluractionality, and reciprocity.

Verbs in written French exhibit more intensive agreement morphology than English verbs: je suis (I am), tu es ("you are", singular informal), elle est (she is), nous sommes (we are), vous êtes ("you are", plural), ils sont (they are).

In Spanish, for instance, subject pronouns do not need to be explicitly present, but in French, its close relative, they are obligatory.

The Spanish equivalent to the French je suis (I am) can be simply soy (lit.

Languages with a rich agreement morphology facilitate relatively free word order without leading to increased ambiguity.

The canonical word order in Basque is subject–object–verb, but all permutations of subject, verb and object are permitted.

[6] An example of nonverbal person agreement, along with contrasting verbal conjugation, can be found from Beja[7] (person agreement affixes in bold): Another example can be found from Ket:[7] In Turkic, and a few Uralic and Australian Aboriginal languages, predicative adjectives and copular complements take affixes that are identical to those used on predicative verbs, but their negation is different.

Below is the conjugation of the verb to be in the present tense (of the infinitive, if it exists, and indicative moods), in English, German, Yiddish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Icelandic, Faroese, Swedish, Norwegian, Latvian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Slovenian, Macedonian, Urdu or Hindi, Persian, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Albanian, Armenian, Irish, Ukrainian, Ancient Attic Greek and Modern Greek.

In the Wanman language these each correspond to la, ya, rra, and wa verbs respectively.

See also a similar table of verb classes and conjugations in Pitjantjatjara, a Wati language wherein the correlating verb classes are presented below also by their imperative verbal endings -la, -∅, -ra and -wa respectively Ngarla, a member of the Ngayarda sub-family of languages has a binary conjugation system labelled: In the case of Ngarla, there is a notably strong correlation between conjugation class and transitivity, with transitive/ditransitive verbs falling in the l-class and intransitive/semi-transitive verbs in the ∅-class.

These classes even extend to how verbs are nominalized as instruments with the l-class verb including the addition of an /l/ before the nominalizing suffix and the blank class remaining blank: l-class example: Kunyjarta-luWoman-ERGmarahandku-rnuCAUS-PSTparnu-nga3SG-GENwarntastickpirri-lpunyjarri,dig-INSkurni-rnuthrow-PSTkunyjartawomankurriteenagerKunyjarta-lu mara ku-rnu parnu-nga warnta pirri-lpunyjarri, kurni-rnu kunyjarta kurriWoman-ERG hand CAUS-PST 3SG-GEN stick dig-INS throw-PST woman teenager‘(The) woman caused her digging stick to be in (the) hand (i.e. picked up her digging stick), (and) threw (it) at (the) girl.’∅-class example[8] Jarrari-punyjarrilight-INSwaa-ngive-FUTngajapa1SG.LOCpinurrufirengaya1SG.NOMnyalilightja-luCAUS-PURPJarrari-punyjarri waa-n ngajapa pinurru ngaya nyali ja-lulight-INS give-FUT 1SG.LOC fire 1SG.NOM light CAUS-PURP‘(A) match (lit.