MORPHOLOGICAL INFLECTIONS
In linguistic morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) 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, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.
- Inflections
- Declension
- Conjugation
- Change in grammatical categories such as
- Case , grammatical cases
- number
- gender
- Tense
- mood
- aspect
- voice
- definiteness
- animacy
Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called inflectional languages, which is a synonym for inflected languages. Morphemes may be added in several different ways:
- Affixation, or simply adding morphemes onto the word without changing the root;
- Reduplication, repeating all or part of a word to change its meaning;
Affix | Grammatical category | Mark | Part of speech |
---|---|---|---|
-s | Number | plural | nouns |
-'s/'/s | Case | genitive | nouns and noun phrases, pronouns (marks independent genitive) |
-self | Case | reflexive | pronouns |
-ing | Aspect | progressive | verbs |
-en/-ed | Aspect | perfect | verbs |
-ed/-t | Tense | past (simple) | verbs |
-s | Person, number, aspect, tense | 3rd person singular present indicative | verbs |
-er | Degree of comparison | comparative | adjectives and adverbs |
-est | Degree of comparison | superlative | adjectives and adverbs |
Discussion