Bangla is a Subject-Obj-Verb (SOV) language. Bangla verb template consists of verb root, aspect marker, tense marker, and tense-wide person maker, in that order. For instance, kha-cch-il-am corresponds to the root of the verb “eat”-continuous aspect marker “cch”- past tense marker “il”- 1st person marker for the past tense “am” all together creates “I was eating.” A conjugated verb can stand in for a complete sentence because it has the person information of the subject attached to the end; however, the subject is often used, for example the fuller form of the previous sentence is ami kha-cch-il-am “I was eating” where ami means “I”.
The citation or dictionary form of Bangla verbs come as verbal noun which corresponds to English gerunds, for instance eating, drinking, and sleeping as in the sentence “Eating, drinking, and sleeping are all he does every day.” However, for convenience we will use English citation or dictionary forms, for instance “to eat”, “to drink”, “to sleep” and so on to translate or gloss Bangla verbal nouns. A verbal noun consists of the verb root and a suffix. Based on the suffixes they are divided in to three categories -a ending verbs, for examples khol-a “open”, lekh-a “to write”, -oa ending verbs, for example kha-oa “to eat”, ja-oa “to go”, and -no ending verbs, for example ghuma-no “to sleep”, patha-no “to send”. To reiterate, only the verb root take part in the verb conjugation, and the verbal noun are used as nouns like the gerunds in English.
A grammatical aspect expresses the temporal structure of an event or state, for instance the aspect of the verb of the English sentence “I am eating” is continuous which is marked with an auxiliary verb be and the morpheme -ing, schematically am-verb-ing. Not all aspects have an overt marker, for instance the aspect of the verb in the English sentence “I eat” is simple aspect. Bangla uses three aspect markers, namely simple, continuous, and perfect. Simple aspect does not any overt marker, continuous aspect uses the marker -ch when the verb root ends with consonant and -cch when the verb root ends with a vowel, and perfect aspect uses the marker -ech. They remain the same for all tenses.
Bangla has three tenses, namely Present, Past, and Future. Present tense does not a have an overt marker. The past tense marker is -il, however it most cases it appears as -l. The future tense marker is -ib, but it appears as -b except for a few verbs. Events in the present and past tenses use all three aspects, but in the future tense it only uses simple aspect.
In English “I play” and “He plays” show that -s is the person agreement marker for a 3rd person subject, here in this case “he”. It is only used in the sentences with present simple verbs. But in Bangla, in verbs in all tense-aspects get person agreement markers. Not only that, but there are three sets of person agreement markers, one for each tense. Below is the chart of person markers for different tenses.
| Present | Past | Future | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st Person | -i | -am | -o |
| 2nd Person | -o | -e | -e |
| 3rd Person | -e | -o | -e |
| 2nd & 3rd Person Honorific | -en | -en | -en |
In English “I play” and “He plays” show that -s is the person agreement marker for a 3rd person subject, here in this case “he”. It is only used in the sentences with present simple verbs. But in Bangla, in verbs in all tense-aspects get person agreement markers. Not only that, but there are three sets of person agreement markers, one for each tense. Below is the chart of person markers for different tenses.
| Present | Past | Future | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st Person | -i | -am | -o |
| 2nd Person | -o | -e | -e |
| 3rd Person | -e | -o | -e |
| 2nd & 3rd Person Honorific | -en | -en | -en |
