What is Conjugation

Conjugation is the change that takes place in a verb to express tense, mood, person and so on. In English, verbs change as they are used, most notably with different people (you, I, we) and different time (now, later, before). Conjugating verbs essentially means altering them into different forms to provide context. If we regard verbs as the action part of the speech, conjugation alters verbs to tell us who is doing the action and when the action takes place. If we didn’t conjugate the verb, leaving it in what is called the infinitive form (to think, to laugh, to whisper), the context (tense, person, mood, etc.) might be unclear or lost all together.

Consider the verb to be and the examples of how it is conjugated into the present tense.

I am 32 years old.

You are a terrific foot player.

Acoustics is the study of the properties of sound.

The sheep is running across the field.

The sheep are running across the field.

First of all, the conjugation of be into the present tense tells us that these actions are happening now. I am (currently) 32 years old. (Right now) you are a terrific football player. Secondly, while one could argue that the context of who is doing the action is already given by pronouns you and I, notice how the conjugated form is tells us that acoustics, which looks like a plural, is a singular word. The importance is really driven home in the last two examples, both of which are grammatically correct as sheep has the same spelling in the singular and plural forms. The first tells us that a (just one) sheep is running across the field, whereas the last tells us that multiple (more than one) sheep are running across the field. No other word in this sentence indicates how many sheep there are but the verb, thus the conjugation is critical to the meaning of the sentence.