Verbs
See also Conjugation of regular Catalan verbs, Conjugation of auxiliary Catalan verbs. See also Catalan conjugation article, which discusses conjugation paradigms with some considerations on current usage, dialectal differences, and historical changes.
As is typical of verbs in virtually all languages, Catalan verbs express an action or a state of being of a given subject, and like verbs in most of the Indo-European languages, Catalan verbs undergo inflection according to the following categories:
- Tense: past, present, future.
- Number: singular or plural.
- Person: first, second or third.
- Mood: indicative, subjunctive, or imperative.
- Aspect: Perfective aspect or imperfective aspect (distinguished only in the past tense as preterite or imperfect).
- Voice: active or passive.
The tables below summarise part of the inflected forms:
| mood | time | simple | composite | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| indicative | present | cantes | has cantat | |
| past | imperfect | cantaves | havies cantat | |
| perfect | cantares | hagueres cantat | ||
| future | cantaràs | hauràs cantat | ||
| subjunctive | present | cantis | hagis cantat | |
| past | cantéssis | haguéssis cantat | ||
| conditional | cantaries | hauries cantat | ||
| imperative | canta | – | ||
| simple | composite | |
|---|---|---|
| infinitive | cantar | haver cantat |
| gerund | cantant | havent cantat |
| participle | cantat | hagut cantat |
Many of the most frequent verbs are irregular. The rest fall into one of three regular conjugations, which are classified according to whether their infinitive ends in -ar, -er, or -ir. (The vowel in the ending — a, e, or i — is called the thematic vowel.) The -ar verbs are the most numerous and the most regular; moreover, new verbs usually adopt the -ar form. The -er and -ir verbs are fewer, and they include more irregular verbs.
A unique feature of Catalan amongst the Romance languages is that it uses periphrastic forms for the past perfect, formed by caomining the verb anar ("to go") with the infinitive. This form has almost replaced the old analytic form, which now is relegated to the written language.
Read more about this topic: Catalan Grammar
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