Inflectional morphology

Inflectional suffixes in German provide information about person, number, tense, and mood. As we can see in Table 4.3 some forms of the German agreement paradigm overlap (that is, the 1^st and 3^rd pers. plural, and infinitival -en forms).

Table 4.3: German inflection paradigm (present tense).

Note that inflected forms of irregular verbs like singen (‘to sing’) exhibit vowel changes in addition to suffixation (cf. (386)). The changes of the root vowel (Ablaut) in so-called ‘strong verbs’ (starke Verben) derive different forms for present tense, past tense and the past participle, as illustrated in (386). Some of these strong verbs involve a vowel change in the present tense (e > i) (compare example (387)).

In German, modal verbs exhibit an inflectional paradigm that differs from that of main verbs (cf. Table 4.4): the 1^st and 3^rd person singular appear without the ending -e and -t respectively. A characteristic distinguishing German from DGS is that modal verbs in German take infinitive verb forms as complements (cf. (388)).

The suppletive forms of the copula verb sein (‘to be’) are provided in Table 5.5. Note that the verb sein is also used as an auxiliary verb in German (see (389)), in addition to the verb haben (‘to have’) (390). The choice of the auxiliary is determined by subtle semantic aspects.

Table 4.4: German modal verb inflection paradigm

Table 4.5: Suppletive forms of the verb sein (‘to be’)