Grammatical Categories of The Finite Verb
Due to the relatively poor system of inflectional morphology in English, the central role that finite verbs play is often not so evident. In other languages however, finite verbs are the locus of much grammatical information. Depending on the language, finite verbs can inflect for the following grammatical categories:
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- Gender, e.g. masculine, feminine or neuter
- Person, e.g. 1st, 2nd, or 3rd (I/we, you, he/she/it/they)
- Number, e.g. singular or plural (or dual)
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- Tense, e.g. present, past or future
- Aspect, e.g. perfect, perfective, progressive, etc.
- Mood, e.g. indicative, subjunctive, imperative, optative, etc.
- Voice, e.g. active or passive
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The first three categories represent agreement information that the finite verb gets from its subject (by way of subject–verb agreement). The second 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).
English is a synthetic language, which means it has limited ability to express these categories by verb inflection, and often conveys such information periphrastically, using auxiliary verbs. In a sentence such as
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- Sam laughs a lot.
the verb form agrees in person (3rd) and number (singular) with the subject, by means of the -s ending, and this form also indicates tense (present), aspect ("simple"), mood (indicative) and voice (active). However most combinations of these categories need to be expressed using auxiliaries:
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- Sam will have been examined by this afternoon.
Here the auxiliaries will, have and been express respectively future time, perfect aspect and passive voice. (See English verb forms.) Highly inflected languages like Latin and Russian, however, frequently express most or even all of these categories in one finite verb.
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