conjugation
- noun
- /ˌkɒn.dʒʊˈɡeɪ.ʃən/
- Specialized
:
conjugación
- Students practiced the conjugation of irregular verbs in their language class yesterday.
- third conjugation
- second conjugation
- Spanish conjugation
Examples
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At the highly regarded summer Latin program at the City University of New York, students are taught rhyming ditties like "In conjugation number three, the sign of the future is long e; in conjugation number four, the e of the future appears once more."
Academic text (1994) -
While the former languages have maintained a four-conjugation system, Spanish and Portuguese have reduced the number to three.
Academic text (1996) -
Latin verbs with root vowels -a-, -e-, -o- went to the second Spanish conjugation, those in -i- and -u- to the third, and short root vowels were treated almost as consistently.
Academic text (1995) -
One obvious parallel in verbal morphology that produces the same division among the Romance languages is the number of verb conjugations themselves.
Academic text (1996) -
Both the cited rules reflect earlier ones that determined which verbs were to form the Latin fourth conjugation (Ernout 148-49).
Academic text (1995) -
In Spanish, the regular verbs fall into three main conjugations based on their endings.
-
The teacher explained that the conjugation of the verb 'to be' varies in different tenses.
Surface Forms
Morphology
conjugation = conjugate (semi-transparent) = con + jug + ate + ion
The form is a regular -ion derivative of 'conjugate', but the specialized sense 'verb class' is not the default meaning a learner would predict from the verb alone.
Etymology
Conjugation comes from con- 'together' and jugare 'to join', so it gives the idea of things put together. That's why a conjugation is a class of verbs that are 'joined' by the same endings and patterns.
