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As is typical of verbs in virtually all languages, Spanish verbs express an action or a state of being of a given subject, and like verbs in most Indo-European languages, Spanish verbs undergo inflection according to the following categories: Tense: past, present, or future; Number: singular or plural; Person: first, second or third
The complexity of Spanish grammar is found primarily in verbs. Inflected forms of a Spanish verb contain a lexical root, a theme vowel, and inflection; for example, the verb cantar ("to sing") becomes cantamos [b] ("we sing") in its first-person plural, present indicative form. [10]
For other irregular verbs and their common patterns, see the article on Spanish irregular verbs. The tables include only the "simple" tenses (that is, those formed with a single word), and not the "compound" tenses (those formed with an auxiliary verb plus a non-finite form of the main verb), such as the progressive, perfect, and passive voice.
An example of the subtlety of the Spanish subjunctive is the way the tense (past, present or future) modifies the expression "be it as it may" (literally "be what it be"): Sea lo que sea (present subjunctive + present subjunctive): "No matter what/whatever." Sea lo que fuera (present subjunctive + past subjunctive): "Whatever it were."
A Spanish verb has nine indicative tenses with more-or-less direct English equivalents: the present tense ('I walk'), the preterite ('I walked'), the imperfect ('I was walking' or 'I used to walk'), the present perfect ('I have walked'), the past perfect —also called the pluperfect— ('I had walked'), the future ('I will walk'), the future ...
Within the indicative mood, there is a present tense habitual aspect form (which can also be used with stative verbs), a past tense habitual aspect form (which also can be used with stative verbs), a near past tense form, a remote past tense form (which can also be used to convey past perspective on an immediately prior situation or event), a ...
Before o (in the first person singular of the indicative present tense) and a (that is, in all persons of the present subjunctive), the so-called G-verbs (sometimes "Go-Yo verbs", "Yo-Go" verbs, or simply "Go" verbs) add a medial -g-after l and n (also after s in asir), add -ig-when the root ends in a vowel, or substitute -c-for -g-.
Stative verbs became the "past tense" or "preterite tense" in Germanic, and new statives were generally formed to accompany the primary eventives, forming a single paradigm. A dozen or so primary statives survived, in the form of the "preterite-present verbs". These retained their stative (in Germanic, past or preterite) inflection, but did not ...