Verb Conjugations

After a stress-riddled hiatus because of college applications, I am back to talk about verbs! Verbs get really, really messy, and I don't like that, but here we are. I'll try to make it easy, but if you dive in yourself you'll get to see a lot of cool but complicated linguistic features.

Here I will walk about tense, aspect and mood, the trifecta of verbs. Verbs encode information about each of these, and sometimes information about the subject as well. As usual, this information manifests in the form of an affix or a particle of some sort. Examples in English include "I had read" vs "I will read" (particle "had" encodes perfect aspect) and "I land" vs " landed" ("-ed" encodes past tense).

Tense tells of when the action took place in time relative to other actions. This is a pretty straightforward concept and is the one we all know and love. English has past and non-past verb forms, and adding "will" before a non-past verb denotes the future tense. Some don't see it this way, arguing that English does't have a future tense all together, but that's a semantic difference not worth going into now.

Other languages have other systems. Mandarin has no tenses. Some languages have multiple past and future tenses, but usually there will not be more future tenses than past tenses. I'm going simple with a past/present/future distinction.

Aspect is the "internal temporal consistency" of an action, or in layman's terms, how the action acts over time in relation to itself. Think about the difference between these:

I read the book last night. | A singular event happened. | Perfective Aspect
I was reading the book last night. | A continuous event happened. | Imperfective progressive Aspect
I used to read the book. | An event happened habitually over a period of time. | Imperfective habitual Aspect
I understood the material. | A continuous, static state. | Imperfective non-progressive aspect
I have read the book. | An action that took place that has specific relevance to the subject. | Perfect Aspect

All this aspect stuff I learned from Artefexian's video on the matter and from his reading suggestion: Bernard Comrie's Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems. Not used to reading academic texts, I had to read parts multiple times because I got lost in long sentences. (After the fourth comma, I don't really remember what you were trying to say any more.) Despite this, Comrie's examples were always relevant and simplified it into distinctions, for example perfective vs. imperfective or continuous vs habitual. This is a very helpful way of thinking and I recommend it. Languages usually have more aspects in the past than in the future just like tenses. Fore example, English has a habitual past form but no habitual future form. (You can say "I used to cook soup" but not "I will have used to cook soup.") I'm going with a simple perfective/imperfective diference for the past and future and just an imperfective form for the present tense, similar to Russian.

Modality encodes why the speaker is talking. There are a lot of moods, but here are few:

John eats. | Statement | Indicative Mood
Run! | Command | Imperative Mood
 I suggest that you be careful. | Wish/Emotion/Possibility/Opinion/Judgment | Subjunctive Mood
When is lunch? | Question | Interrogative Mood
Chloe should do her homework once it is assigned. | Condition | Conditional Mood

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