A finite verb is a verb that is inflected for person and for tense according to the rules and categories of the languages it occurs in. Finite verbs can form independent clauses, which can stand by their own as complete sentences.
In most Indo-European languages, every grammatically correct sentence or clause must contain a finite verb; sentence fragments not containing finite verbs are described as phrases. In English, as in most related languages, only verbs in certain moods are finite. These include:
the indicative mood (expressing a state of affairs); e.g., "The bulldozer demolished the restaurant," "The leaves were yellow and stiff."
the subjunctive mood (expressing something that might or might not be the state of affairs, depending on some other part of the sentence); nearly extinct in English.
In linguistics, an auxiliary or helping verb is a verb whose function it is to give further semantic information about the main or full verb which follows it.
Every clause has a finiteverb which consists of a full verb (a non-auxiliary verb) and optionally one or more auxiliary verbs, each of which is a separate word.
French, German, and Dutch use it for verbs of motion and becoming, and (in German and Dutch) for "to be" itself, as does Italian.
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