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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:
Infinitive (abbreviated INF) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs that do not show a tense.As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages.
In Italian, the infinitive essere continues Latin esse as existential 'to be', while stare has the primary meaning "to stay" and is used as a copula only in a few situations: to express one's state of physical health (sto bene "I am well"); to form progressive aspects (sto parlando "I am speaking"); and (especially in the south of Italy) with ...
Italian makes use of the T–V distinction in second-person address. The second-person nominative pronoun is tu for informal use, and for formal use, the third-person form Lei (and historically Ella) has been used since the Renaissance. [6] [17] It is used like Sie in German, usted in Spanish, and vous in French.
In many Romance languages including Spanish and Portuguese, the main infinitives are -ar, -er, and -ir, with addition of -ôr (Portuguese only) which only exists in the verb pôr, traditionally considered as -er verbs. While in Italian, the infinitives are -are, -ere, -ire.
Note: In the Romance languages, which lack deponent or passive verb forms, the Classical Latin deponent verbs either disappeared (being replaced with non-deponent verbs of a similar meaning) or changed to a non-deponent form. For example, in Spanish and Italian, mīrārī changed to mirar(e) by changing all the verb forms to the previously ...
The first is using the form hålla på att + infinitive ("hold on" meaning "in the process of"). For instance jag håller på att skriva ett brev ("I'm writing a letter"). Some verbs are always or default continuous, for instance verbs indicating motion, location or position, such as gå "walk", ligga "lie", sitta "sit" and stå "stay".
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.