conjugation

Part of the conjugation of the Spanish verb correr, "to run", the lexeme is "corr-". Red represents the speaker, purple the addressee (or speaker/hearer) and teal a third person.One person represents the singular number and two, the plural number. Dawn represents the past (specifically the preterite), noon the present and night the future.

In linguistics, conjugation (/ˌkɒndʒʊˈɡeɪʃən/ con-juu-GAY-shən) is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar). For instance, the verb break can be conjugated to form the words break, breaks, and broke. While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic or Spanish are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms. Some languages such as Georgian, Basque, and Navajo have highly complex conjugation systems with hundreds of possible conjugations for every verb.