Verbal Inflectional Morphology in Germanic

Modern Germanic standard languages exhibit up to six verbal categories: Person (1st, 2nd, 3rd), Number (singular, plural), Mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), Tense (present, past, future), Voice (active, passive), and Aspect (e.g., progressive). However, they vary immensely with respect to which of these categories are expressed inflectionally on the verb, with Icelandic and German exhibiting the highest number of inflectional categories (Person, Number, Mood, Tense) as opposed to their highly deflecting counterparts English (mainly Tense) and Afrikaans (full deflection). The prototypical inflectional category of Modern Germanic is Tense, followed by Number (and Person), while inflectional distinctions for Mood have vanished in many cases. Inflectional marking for Tense, that is, the opposition between present and past tense (i.e., the preterite) has been preserved in all cases but Afrikaans, Yiddish, and Luxembourgish, which suffered from preterite loss. Here, past tense reference is expressed periphrastically through perfect constructions. Germanic languages lack inflectional future marking. However, they have all developed periphrastic strategies to convey future time reference. Subject agreement for Number and Person has been lost in Mainland Scandinavian (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish), Afrikaans, and English (apart from the 3rd ps. sg. in the present tense), whereas the remaining languages rely on inflectional distinctions for Number only and/or exhibit inflectional endings for Person/Number combinations. As for Mood, only Icelandic and Germanic still preserve inflectional paradigms for the subjunctive, while the remaining languages have established other means to express this mood value (mainly periphrastic constructions). Voice distinctions (active vs. passive) are prototypically expressed periphrastically, though North Germanic languages have also developed synthetic passive constructions as opposed to their West Germanic counterparts. Aspect is the only category that is not inflectionally encoded on the verb in any Germanic language. However, periphrastic constructions conveying aspects such as the resultative, perfect, or progressive emerged anew as a result of grammaticalization processes. Finally, the major class distinction between weak and strong verbs has been maintained in all cases except for Afrikaans.