Inflection

Inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, and mood. The inflection of verbs is also called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles as declension.

Overview

An inflection expresses one or more grammatical categories with a prefix, suffix or infix, or another internal modification such as a vowel change. For example, the English verb 'sing' has the inflected forms 'sang', 'sung', and 'singing'. The inflectional process of verbs is called conjugation. Nouns can be inflected for number (singular or plural), as can pronouns, articles and adjectives (for example, in languages such as French and German).

Inflection in various languages

In some languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French, verbs are highly inflected. In others, such as English, verb inflection is less significant. Some languages, like Finnish and Hungarian, have extensive case systems, with nouns having as many as 15 different forms.

Inflection vs. Derivation

Inflection is a process that makes words convey grammatical meanings, while derivation creates new words. For example, in English, 'run' is the base form of a verb, but it can be inflected to produce 'runs', 'running', and 'ran', whereas derivation can produce 'runner' from 'run'.

See also

• Morphology (linguistics)
• Grammatical conjugation
• Grammatical declension
• Grammatical number
• Grammatical case
• Grammatical gender
• Grammatical mood
• Grammatical tense
• Grammatical aspect
• Grammatical voice

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