finiteness

Finiteness distinguishes verb forms that carry the full range of tense, aspect, and mood marking available in a grammar, and that can therefore stand as the predicate of an independent clause, from verb forms that lack this marking and depend on another element of the sentence. A finite form typically also agrees with its subject in person and number where a grammar marks agreement at all. A nonfinite form, by contrast, is verbally derived but behaves more like another word class: a form that behaves like a noun, one that behaves like an adjective, and one that behaves like an adverb are all commonly nonfinite, and an infinitive counts as nonfinite even where it keeps ordinary verbal shape. The boundary is not perfectly sharp across languages, since what counts as full tense-aspect-mood marking is itself a matter of degree, but the distinction remains useful for separating predicating verb forms from their dependent counterparts.