User:Elector Dark/Mestian/2

Verbs
All native Mestian verbs are derived from abstract, lexically theoretical roots, whereas loaned verbs are generally reanalysed as native stems. All Mestian verbs have a root from which they are derived, and a stem — the derived extension of the verb's root that takes inflectional affixes.

In Mestian terms, roots are the smallest carriers of semantic information in the language; they are theoretical and only roughly inferrable from properly formed verbs. Since roots cannot be directly inflected, they take on stem-forming affixes, generally derivational in nature, and form inflectable stems. These stems then further take on inflectional affixes, which then form fully conjugated verbs. Only properly inflected stems are considered properly grammatical and may be used in clauses. For the sake of coherence, all such situations where the stem looks identical to the root are treated as derivation through the means of a zero suffix.

Mestian verbs show the categories of aspect, tense, evidentiality and modality, as well as the person, gender and number of their arguments, and they are reflected through a combination of inflectional and derivational means. A clear gradient in feature expression can be seen:


 * Derivational: root-internal (radical) aspect, lexical (derived) aspect
 * Mixed derivational-inflectional: radical and derived tense, combined tense-aspect inflection
 * Mostly inflectional: inflected tense, argument number
 * Exclusively inflectional: argument person, gender, mood, evidentiality

Tense and aspect are frequently coordinated in the Mestian verb system, where certain affixes (primarily derivational ones) mark for both tense and aspect simultaneously, and even sometimes redundantly. Furthermore, the person, gender and number of the verb's arguments are also generally marked using the same affix that is poorly separatable.

The primary temporal categories distinguished by Mestian verbs are the present and generic (also called the timeless), and several further categories may be indicated, such as the past, future, historic and narrative (or, rather, renarrative) tenses.