The future is expressed by a particle tha (from earlier thé[o] na '[I] want to') followed by a finite verb e.g., tha grápho 'I will write.' Formally, the finite forms of the verb (those with personal endings) consist of a stem + (optionally) the perfective aspect marker (-s- in active, -th- in passive) + personal ending (indicating person, tense, mood, voice).
Biber et al. report that 25% of all finite verbs in academic prose are passives, versus 15% of all finite verbs in newswire text, and 2% of all finite verbs in conversation (1999 [35] 476).
In order to generate the surface structure of a polar interrogative the finite verb will then be moved to the sentence initial position.
The yes/no question is expressed by a shift of the finite verb from its final position in the underlying structure into the utterance initial position, a move affecting, hence, both the sentence's final and the sentence's initial constituents.
Middle Mongol had a slightly larger set of declarative finite verb suffix forms and a smaller number of participles, which were less likely to be used as finite predicates.
In principle, each tense stem provides five moods for the finite verb (with personal endings), a participle, and an infinitive.
Hence the underlying frame of a certain language has a fixed constituent order in terms of the finite verb and its two arguments, subject and object.
The second characteristic feature of Basque concerns the finite verb, which acts as a summary of all the noun phrases in the sentence by inflecting for tense, voice, person, number, and mood.
The placement of the infinitive absolute before the finite verb (Finite/Predicator) typically expresses a high degree of certainty on the part of the speaker, thus grammaticalizing modalization in the verbal group (van der Merwe et al. 1999: 158; Waltke and O'Connor 1990: 584-488).
