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In PIE, *h 1 es-was an athematic verb in -mi; that is, the first person singular was *h 1 esmi; this inflection survives in English am, Pashto yem, Persian am, Sanskrit asmi, Bengali first-person verb ending -ām, Old Church Slavonic esmĭ, etc. This verb is generally reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European thus: [1]
Verbs are given in their "dictionary form". The exact form given depends on the specific language: For the Germanic languages and for Welsh, the infinitive is given. For Latin, the Baltic languages, and the Slavic languages, the first-person singular present indicative is given, with the infinitive supplied in parentheses.
Languages differ in the way they express such meanings; some of them use the copular verb, possibly with an expletive pronoun like the English there, while other languages use different verbs and constructions, like the French il y a (which uses parts of the verb avoir ' to have ', not the copula) or the Swedish finns (the passive voice of the ...
The ergative-absolutive alignment is in contrast to nominative–accusative alignment, which is observed in English and most other Indo-European languages, where the single argument of an intransitive verb ("She" in the sentence "She walks") behaves grammatically like the agent of a transitive verb ("She" in the sentence "She finds it") but ...
The formation of secondary verbs remained part of the derivational system and did not necessarily have completely predictable meanings (compare the remnants of causative constructions in English — to fall vs. to fell, to sit vs. to set, to rise vs. to raise and to rear).
Perfective verbs, whether derived or basic, can be made imperfective with a suffix. [4]: p84 Each aspect has a past form and a non-past form. The non-past verb forms are conjugated by person/number, while the past verb forms are conjugated by gender/number. The present tense is indicated with the non-past imperfective form.
The Germanic language family is one of the language groups that resulted from the breakup of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It in turn divided into North, West and East Germanic groups, and ultimately produced a large group of mediaeval and modern languages, most importantly: Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (North); English, Dutch and German (West); and Gothic (East, extinct).
In some cases, particularly with noun and adjective phrases, it is not always clear which dependents are to be classed as complements, and which as adjuncts.Although in principle the head-directionality parameter concerns the order of heads and complements only, considerations of head-initiality and head-finality sometimes take account of the position of the head in the phrase as a whole ...