7.1 - Finite verb forms
In traditional terms, it can be said that Anawanda verbs inflect for mood, tense and person.
Moods are five: indicative, conditional, optative, injunctive and imperative. Among moods, only indicative has a full paradigm of tenses, namely imperfect, perfect, aorist and pluperfect; conditional only distinguishes between imperfect and aorist (also labelled present conditional and past conditional respectively); optative, injunctive and imperative have no distinct tenses.
The allowed combinations of moods and tenses yield a system of nine verb forms, which developed from the overlapping of a three-way distinction of aspect/modality (imperfective, perfective and virtual) onto a three way distinction of tense (past, present and future, later reinterpreted as past, non-past, volitive). The correlation is shown in the table below:
| Imperfective | Perfective | Virtual | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Past | aorist | pluperfect | past conditional |
| Non-past | imperfect | perfect | present conditional |
| Volitive | injunctive | imperative | optative |
This correlation is material to the morphological processes of conjugation, as will be shown in paragraphs 7.3, 7.4 and 7.6. The semantics of these nine forms are as follows.
The aorist is a pure and simple past. Perfect and pluperfect encode a state, respectively in the present and in the past. The usage of pluperfect as a past of the past is marginal.
The imperfect has a wide semantic range, encompassing: hic et nunc present, present continuous, habitual and general, and immediate future ("to be going to").
Present conditional encodes possibility, while past conditional is mainly for the irrealis and counterfactual.
The optative is often used as an indicative or conditional entailing wish or fear, and sometimes it appears as a volutary future. Injunctive ranges from a simple imperative to a future of obligation. The imperative is for command.
:: Anawanda TOC :: Previous :: Up :: Next ::