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Italian verbs have a high degree of inflection, the majority of which follows one of three common patterns of conjugation. Italian conjugation is affected by mood, person, tense, number, aspect and occasionally gender. The three classes of verbs (patterns of conjugation) are distinguished by the endings of the infinitive form of the verb:
The past participle is used in Italian as both an adjective and to form many of the compound tenses of the language. There are regular endings for the past participle, based on the conjugation class . There are, however, many irregular forms as not all verbs follow the pattern, particularly the -ere verbs.
Ser is also used with the past participle of some unaccusative verbs such as néixer, which in medieval and dialectal Catalan made their compound tenses with ser. When referring to animate objects, estar is only used to tell about non-permanent conditions (for example estàs molt guapa, "you look good" as in "better than usual.")
The verb later transformed to *haveō in many Romance languages (but etymologically Spanish haber), resulting in irregular indicative present forms *ai, *as, and *at (all first-, second- and third-person singular), but ho, hai, ha in Italian and -pp-(appo) in Logudorese Sardinian in present tenses.
A corresponding conditional tense is formed in the same way but using one of the past-tense forms of habēre. Numerous lexical changes. A number of words were borrowed from the Germanic languages and Celtic languages. Many basic nouns and verbs, especially those that were short or had irregular morphology, were replaced by longer derived forms ...
The preterite or preterit (/ ˈ p r ɛ t ər ɪ t / PRET-ər-it; abbreviated PRET or PRT) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense.
The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of an utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude toward it.Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used ...
It can be made into a past tense form by replacing the auxiliary have with had; see below.) Various multi-word constructions exist for combining past tense with progressive (continuous) aspect, which denotes ongoing action; with perfect aspect; and with progressive and perfect aspects together. These and other common past tense constructions ...