Inflectional Verbal Morphology

Sereer inflectional morphology includes affixes, proclitics, and auxilliary verbs.

Subject and object marking is obligatory on verbs. Subject marking is usually prefixal, while objects suffixal.

Either tense or aspect must be marked on verbs that are not in citation form, but not both. Tenses are verb suffixes, while aspect marking consists of clitics, or an auxiliary verb which come before the main verb root.

Present Tense

Sample present-tense verbal paradigm:

Present:

Gloss	Sereer	Gloss	Sereer
I ...	-aam	we ...	i-[mut]-a
you ...	-aa	you (pl) ...	nu-[mut]-a
s/he ...	-a	they ...	a-[mut]-a

Stem-initial consonant mutation

See also Nominal morphology for the similar phenomenon in nouns.

Verb stems undergo a stem-initial consonant mutation as a form of inflection for plural subject. Only initial consonants that can mutate actually do mutate; some never appear to mutate (e.g. /j/, /m/, /n/). Verbs intended as plurals that do not show a distinct plural allomorph are often disambiguated from singular forms with the addition of a suffix (or clitic?) -jo.

The mutation follows one of two "tracks", depending on whether or not the stem-initial consonant is an implosive. Note that these mutations are simplified relative to the nominal stem-initial consonat mutations.

The non-implosive "track":

• (sg) continuants --> (pl) prenasalized stop, e.g. weʄ --> mbeʄ 'to swim' (022)
• (sg) voiceless oral stop, non-implosive --> (pl) prenasalized stop (not well-attested, few verbs with initial voiceless stops)
• (sg) voiced oral stop, non-implosive --> (pl) prenasalized stop, disooχ --> ndisooχ 'to sneeze' (029)

The implosive "track":

• (sg) voiced implosive stop --> (pl) voiceless implosive stop, e.g. ɗok --> ƭok 'to grind' (047)