Conjugation
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Conjugation refers to the inflection of verbs as well as to specific classes of verbs taking certain patterns of inflection. Typical conjugational categories include tense, aspect, and person. As with declension, the level of conjugation in a given language can very a great deal, with some having next to none (such as English) and others having vast inflectional tables (such as many American Indian languages).
Language vary not only in levels of conjugation but in what they conjugate for. In the Indo-European languages, verbs typically inflect for person and number, while Japanese verbs have no indications of it at all. However, the verbs of Japanese do inflect for politeness and deference in a way that European verbs would not. Some languages take personal marking even further than the IE languages, including the subject, the object, and even the indirect object on a verb. Numerous languages conjugate for tense, mood, and aspect, even if only marginally.
A wide variety of inflectional devices are used in conjugation, perhaps even more than in nouns.
Conjugation classes
In addition to the process of verbal inflection, conjugation may refer to one of several classes of verb within a language that share a pattern of inflection (analogous to the declension classes of nouns). As with declensions, each class may include much variation and irregularity in the specifics but typically follow a distinct paradigm. The amount of difference between each conjugation varies with each languages. A conjugation class may have little impact on the underlying verbal inflections aside from coloring them (as is the case more or less in Spanish and Italian) or it may wildly alter patterns. In languages with particularly complex conjugation (such as Sanskrit or Cheyenne) even verbs within one conjugation class may have great differences in inflectional patterns. Others may apply remarkably similar inflections even across ostensibly different classes, as tends to happen in Japanese.
Examples
Italian
- Mangiare - to eat
- Mangiamo - We eat
- Mangiavamo - We were eating
Japanese
- Miru - see
- Mita - saw
- Mimasu - see (polite)
- Minakatta - didn't see
