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Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i.e. relational) information, such as grammatical gender, tense, person, etc.
Declension and conjugationThose who study grammar may be familiar with two traditional grammatical terms that refer to inflectional paradigms of specific word classes:
Below is an example of a noun declension of the Latin noun vir 'man'. It is inflected for case and number with suffixes.
Inflection vs. derivationInflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes (atomic meaning units) to a word, which may indicate grammatical information (i.e., case, number, person, grammatical gender/word class, mood, mode, tense, aspect, other relational info). Compare with derivational morphemes (http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/ComparisonOfInflectionAndDeriv.htm) that change meaning, (i.e., creating a new word from an existing word, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (noun to verb)). Words generally do not appear in dictionaries with inflectional morphemes. But they often do appear with derivational morphemes. For instance, English dictionaries list readable and readability, words with derivational suffixes, along with their root read. However, no English dictionary will list book as one entry and books as a separate entry nor will they list jump and jumped as two different entries. In some languages, inflected words do not appear in a fundamental form (the Root morpheme) except in dictionaries and grammars. Inflectional morphologyLanguages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called inflectional languages. Morphemes may be added in several different ways:
A schema of all inflections for a word is sometimes called a paradigm. Affixing includes prefixing (adding before the base), and suffixing (adding after the base), as well as the much less common infixing (inside) and circumfixing (a combination of prefix and suffix). Inflection is most typically realized by adding an inflectional morpheme (i.e. affixation) to the base form (either the root or a stem). Relation to morphological typologyInflection is sometimes confused with synthesis in languages. The two terms are related but not the same. Languages are broadly classified morphologically into analytic and synthetic categories, or more realistically along a continuum between the two extremes. Analytic languages isolate meaning into individual words, whereas synthetic languages create words not found in the dictionary by fusing or agglutinating morphemes, sometimes to the extent of having a whole sentence's worth of meaning in a single word. Inflected languages by definition fall into the synthetic category, though not all synthetic languages need be inflected. Inflection in various languagesAll Indo-European languages, such as English, German, Russian, Spanish, French, and Hindi are inflected to a greater or lesser extent. Latin, Latvian, and Lithuanian are moderately inflected. The Dravidian languages are highly inflected, as well as the Finno-Ugric languages and most Amerind languages. Some of the major Eastern Asian languages (such as the various Chinese languages and Vietnamese) are not inflected, or show very little inflection, so they are considered Analytic languages (a.k.a. isolating languages). Japanese shows a high degree of inflection on verbs, less so on adjectives and nouns, but it is always strictly agglutinative and extremely regular. Formally, every noun phrase must be marked for case, but this is done by invariable particles (clitic postpositions). (Many grammarians consider Japanese particles to be separate words, and therefore not an inflection, while others consider agglutination a type of inflection, and therefore consider Japanese nouns inflected.) Basque (a language isolate, i. e. one in its own unique family) is a special case of the opposite end of the scale -- it is extremely inflected, in fact polysynthetic, both in nouns and verbs. A Basque noun is inflected in 17 different ways for case, times 4 ways for its definiteness and number, and those first 68 forms are just a start, since the case depends on other parts of the sentence, which in turn are inflected for the noun again. It's been estimated that at two levels of recursion, a Basque noun may have 458,683 inflected forms (Agirre et al, 1992 (http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/A/A92/A92-1016.pdf)). Verb forms are similarly complex, agreeing with the subject, the direct object and several other arguments. Although Old English was an inflected language, Modern English is considered a weakly inflected language, since its nouns have only vestiges of inflection (plurals, the pronouns), and its regular verbs have only 2 inflections: Third person singular, and everything else. Similarly, Old Norse was inflected, but modern Swedish, Norwegian and Danish have, like English, lost almost all inflection. Icelandic, however, preserves many of the inflections of Old Norse. ExamplesEnglishIn English many nouns are inflected for number with the inflectional plural affix -s (as in "dog" → "dog-s"), and most English verbs are inflected for tense with the inflectional past tense affix -ed (as in "call" → "call-ed"). English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the third person singular in the present tense (with -s), and the so-called present participle (with -ing). English short adjectives are inflected to mark comparative and superlative forms (with -er and -est respectively). In addition, English also shows inflection by Ablaut (mostly in verbs) and Umlaut (mostly in nouns), as well the odd long-short vowel alternation. For example:
A limited subset of English verbs and nouns are related by stress-change inflection. Such is the case of pairs like a record (noun, stressed on the first syllable) vs. to record (verb, stressed on the last). German, which is related to English, employs many of these inflectional devices, but Umlaut and Ablaut are widespread, while in English they are considered more like exceptions. Latin and Romance languagesThe Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, French, etc., are more inflectional than English, especially when it comes to verb forms. A single morpheme usually carries information about person, number, tense, aspect and mood, and the verb paradigm may be considerably complex. Nouns are simpler, but they are inflected by number and grammatical gender. Latin is in fact more complicated, showing also some verb inflection for voice (which is realized only by syntactic means in its daughter languages), and a more complicated noun paradigm (with several patterns of declension, and three genders instead of the two found in most Romance tongues). There is no Ablaut or Umlaut, and only little predictable vowel alternation, found on certain verbs where the Latin root had the phonemes /E/ or /O/. External links
References and recommended reading
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