Inflection of the Spanish lexeme for "cat", with blue representing the masculine gender, pink representing the feminine gender, grey representing the form used for mixed-gender, and green representing the plural number. The singular is unmarked.

This article is about inflection in linguistics. For a mathematical meaning, see Inflection point.

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) to reflect grammatical (that is, relational) information, such as gender, tense, number or person. The concept of a "word" independent of the different inflections is called a lexeme, and the form of a word that is considered to have no or minimal inflection is called a lemma. An organized list of the inflected forms of a given lexeme is called an inflectional paradigm. Image File history File links Size of this preview: 230 × 598 pixel Image in higher resolution (250 × 650 pixel, file size: 122 KB, MIME type: image/png) Date 2 Enero 2007 Author Serg!o Permission Sin restricciones File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file... Image File history File links Size of this preview: 230 × 598 pixel Image in higher resolution (250 × 650 pixel, file size: 122 KB, MIME type: image/png) Date 2 Enero 2007 Author Serg!o Permission Sin restricciones File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file... Plot of y = x3 with inflection point of (0,0). ... Intonation, in linguistics, is the variation of pitch when speaking. ... For the surname, see Grammer. ... In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word or sentence. ... Definition A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of words that are the same in basic meaning. ... In linguistics, grammatical gender is a morphological category associated with the expression of gender through inflection or agreement. ... Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. ... In linguistics, grammatical number is a morphological category characterized by the expression of quantity through inflection or agreement. ... Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to the participant role of a referent, such as the speaker, the addressee, and others. ... Definition A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of words that are the same in basic meaning. ... In linguistics, and particularly in morphology, a lemma or citation form is the canonical form of a lexeme. ...

Examples in English

In 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"). In linguistics, grammatical number is a morphological category characterized by the expression of quantity through inflection or agreement. ... Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. ...

English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the third person singular in the present tense (with -s), and the 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: In linguistics, the term ablaut designates a system of vowel gradation (i. ... The word umlaut is used in both linguistic and typographic senses. ...

• Write, wrote, written (ablaut, and also suffixing in the participle)
• Sing, sang, sung (ablaut)
• Foot, feet (umlaut)
• Mouse, mice (umlaut)
• Child, children (vowel alternation, and also suffixing in the plural)

In the past, writers sometimes gave words such as doctor, Negro, dictator, professor, and orator Latin inflections to mark them as feminine, thus forming doctress, Negress, dictatrix, professress, and oratress. These inflected forms were never frequently used, although many English users continue to use Latin endings today in somewhat more common constructions such as actress, waitress, executrix, and dominatrix. In linguistics, a participle is a kind of verbal adjective; it indicates that the noun it modifies is a participant in the action that the participle refers to. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ...

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.

Declension and conjugation

Two traditional grammatical terms refer to inflections of specific word classes: In grammar, a part of speech or word class is defined as the role that a word (or sometimes a phrase) plays in a sentence. ...

• Declension: inflection of nouns, and often pronouns, adjectives, and determiners as well; often involving number, case, and/or gender; and
• Conjugation: inflection of verbs, often involving tense, mood, voice, and/or aspect, as well as agreement with one or more arguments in number, gender, and/or person.

Below is an example of a noun declension of the Latin noun vir 'man'. It is inflected for case and number with suffixes. In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns and adjectives to indicate such features as number (typically singular vs. ... Noun or noun substantive is a lexical category which is defined in terms of how its members combine with other grammatical kinds of expressions. ... In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun phrase. ... In grammar, an adjective is a part of speech that modifies a noun or a pronoun, usually by describing it or making its meaning more specific. ... Determiners are words which quantify or identify nouns. ... In linguistics, grammatical number is a morphological category characterized by the expression of quantity through inflection or agreement. ... In linguistics, declension is a feature of inflected languages: generally, the alteration of a noun to indicate its grammatical role. ... In linguistics, grammatical gender is a morphological category associated with the expression of gender through inflection or agreement. ... In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (regular alteration according to rules of grammar). ... It has been suggested that Verbal agreement be merged into this article or section. ... Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. ... It has been suggested that prohibitive mood be merged into this article or section. ... In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc. ... In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in the described event or state. ... In languages, agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. ... A syntactic verb argument, in linguistics, is a phrase that appears in a relationship with the verb in a proposition. ... Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to the participant role of a referent, such as the speaker, the addressee, and others. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ...

Below is a conjugation of the verb hi 'arrive' in Lakota. It is inflected for person with prefixes and for number with the suffix -pi. The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun, which generally marks the subject of a verb, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Possessive case. ... The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given. ... The accusative case (abbreviated ACC) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. ... In linguistics, ablative case (also called the sixth case) (abbreviated ABL) is a name given to cases in various languages whose common thread is that they mark motion away from something, though the details in each language may differ. ... Lakota (also Lakhota, Teton, Teton Sioux) is the largest of the three languages of the Sioux, of the Siouan family. ...

However, these two terms seem to be biased toward well-known dependent-marking languages (such as Spanish, Latin, German, Russian, Japanese etc.). In dependent-marking languages, nouns in adpositional phrases can carry inflectional morphemes. (Adpositions include prepositions and postpositions.) In head-marking languages, the adpositions can carry the inflection in adpositional phrases. This means that these languages will have inflected adpositions. In Western Apache (San Carlos dialect), the postposition -ká’ 'on' is inflected for person and number with prefixes. A dependent-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the dependents or modifiers, rather than the heads or nuclei, of the phrase in question. ... Look up preposition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A head-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads (or nuclei) of the phrase in question, rather than the modifiers or dependents. ... Links Western Apache-English Dictionary (White Mountain) White Mountain Apache Tribe (Arizona Intertribal Council) San Carlos Apache Tribe (Arizona Intertribal Council) Tonto Apache Tribe (Arizona Intertribal Council) Yavapai-Apache Nation Official Website Yavapai-Apache Nation (Arizona Intertribal Council) White Mountain Apache Tribe White Mountain Apache photographs map of Fort Apache... San Carlos (Western Apache Sengaa) is a census-designated place located in Gila County, Arizona. ...

Traditional grammars have specific terms for inflections of nouns and verbs, but not for adpositions.

Inflection vs. derivation

See also: Synthetic language

Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes (atomic meaning units) to a word, which may indicate grammatical information (for example, case, number, person, gender or word class, mood, tense, or aspect). Compare with derivational morphemes, which create a new word from an existing word, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (for example, changing a noun to a verb). A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. ... In Linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a given language. ... In linguistics, derivation is the process of creating new lexemes from other lexemes, for example, by adding a derivational affix. ...

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 traditional 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. The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. ...

Inflectional morphology

Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called inflectional languages. Morphemes may be added in several different ways:

• Affixation, or simply adding morphemes onto the word without changing the root,
• Reduplication, doubling all or part of a word to change its meaning,
• Alternation, exchanging one sound for another in the root (usually vowel sounds, as in the ablaut process found in Germanic strong verbs and the umlaut often found in nouns, among others).
• Suprasegmental variations, such as of stress, pitch or tone, where no sounds are added or changed but the intonation and relative strength of each sound is altered regularly. For an example, see Initial-stress-derived noun.

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). Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Reduplication, in linguistics, is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word, or only part of it, is repeated. ... In linguistics, Alternation is when a set of morphosyntactic properties is phonologically expressed in two or more different ways in different words. ... In linguistics, the term ablaut (from German ab- in the sense down, reducing + Laut sound) designates a system of vowel gradations in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages. ... A strong inflection is an irregular inflection, in which the stem of a word changes. ... The word umlaut is used in both linguistic and typographic senses. ... Noun or noun substantive is a lexical category which is defined in terms of how its members combine with other grammatical kinds of expressions. ... In linguistics, prosody refers to intonation, rhythm, and vocal stress in speech. ... In linguistics, stress is the emphasis given to some syllables (often no more than one in each word, but in many languages, long words have a secondary stress a few syllables away from the primary stress, as in the words cóunterfòil or còunterintélligence. ... Pitch accent is a kind of accent system employed in many languages around the world. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Tone (linguistics). ... Initial-stress-derivation is a phonological process in English, wherein verbs become nouns or adjectives when the stress is moved to the first syllable from a later one -- usually, but not always, the second. ...

Inflection is most typically realized by adding an inflectional morpheme (that is, affixation) to the base form (either the root or a stem). In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest lingual unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ... Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. ... This article is in need of attention. ...

Relation to morphological typology

Main article: morphological typology

Inflection 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. Morphological typology was developed by brothers Friedrich and August von Schlegel. ... A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. ... Morphological typology was developed by brothers Friedrich and August von Schlegel. ... An isolating language is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and are considered to be full-fledged words. By contrast, in a synthetic language, a word is composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote its syntactic meanings. ... A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. ... In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest lingual unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ...

Inflection in various languages

Uralic languages

The Uralic languages (comprising Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic) are agglutinative languages, following from the agglutination in Proto-Uralic. The largest languages are Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian, all European Union official languages. Uralic inflection is, or is developed from, affixing. Grammatical markers directly added to the word perform the same function as prepositions in English. Almost all words are inflected according to their roles in the sentence: verbs, nouns, pronouns, numerals, adjectives, and some particles. Geographical distribution of Samoyedic, Finnic, Ugric and Yukaghir languages  Yukaghir  Samoyedic  Ugric  Finnic The Uralic languages (pronounced: ) form a language family of about 30 languages spoken by approximately 20 million people. ... Approximate geographical distribution of areas where indigenous Finno-Ugric languages are spoken. ... Geographical distribution of Samoyedic, Finnic, Ugric and Yukaghir languages The Samoyedic languages are spoken on both sides of the Ural mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by perhaps 30,000 speakers altogether. ... It has been suggested that Agglutination be merged into this article or section. ... Proto-Uralic is the ancestor language of the Uralic languages, including the hypothetical families of the Samoyedic languages and the Finno-Ugric languages. ...

Hungarian and Finnish, in particular, often simply concatenate suffixes. For example, Finnish talossanikinko "in my house, too?" consists of talo-ssa-ni-kin-ko. However, in the Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Sami), there are processes which affect the root, particularly consonant gradation. The original suffixes may disappear (and appear only by liaison), leaving behind the modification of the root. This process is extensively developed in Estonian and Sami, and makes them also inflected, not only agglutinating languages. The Estonian accusative case, for example, is expressed by a modified root: maja →majja (historical form *majam). Geographical distribution of Finno-Ugric (Finno-Permic in blue, Ugric in green). ... Consonant gradation is a type of consonant mutation, in which consonants alternate between various grades. It is found in some Finno-Lappic languages such as Finnish, Estonian and Sámi; moreover, the Votic language is known for its extensive set of gradation patterns. ... This article should be translated from material at fr:Liaison. ... The accusative case (abbreviated ACC) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. ...

Indo-European languages

All Indo-European languages, such as Albanian, English, German, Russian, Persian (Fârsi), Spanish, French, Sanskrit, and Hindi are inflected to a greater or lesser extent. In general, older Indo-European languages such as Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, and more prominently Greek and Sanskrit in all their historical forms, are extensively inflected. Deflexion caused newer languages such as English and French to lose much of their historical inflection. Afrikaans, an extremely young language, is almost completely uninflected and borders on being analytic. Some branches of Indo-European (for example, the Slavic languages and the Romance languages) have generally retained more inflection than others (such as many Germanic languages, with exceptions). The Indo-European languages comprise a family of several hundred related languages and dialects [1], including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many spoken in the Indian subcontinent (South Asia), the Iranian plateau (Southwest Asia), and Central Asia. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Persian (Local names: فارسی Fârsi or پارسی Pârsi)* is an Indo-European language spoken in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan as well as by minorities in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, India, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Southern Russia, neighboring countries, and elsewhere. ... The Sanskrit language ( , for short ) is a classical language of India, a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and one of the 23 official languages of India. ... Hindi (हिन्दी) is a language spoken mainly in North and Central India. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ... The Sanskrit language ( , for short ) is an old Indo-Aryan language from the Indian Subcontinent, the classical literary language of the Hindus of India[1], a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and one of the 23 official languages of India. ... Deflexion is a linguistic process related to inflectional languages (like all members of the Indo-European language family) reflecting a gradual decline of the inflectional morphemes (atomic semantic units) bound to lexemes (abstract word units). ... Afrikaans is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia. ... An isolating language is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and are considered to be full-fledged words. By contrast, in a synthetic language, a word is composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote its syntactic meanings. ... The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages) comprise the languages of the Slavic peoples. ... The Romance languages, also called Romanic languages, are a subfamily of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken by the common people evolving in different areas after the break-up of the Roman Empire. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

English

Old English was a moderately inflected language, using an extensive case system similar to that of modern Icelandic or German. Middle and Modern English lost progressively more of the Old English inflectional system. 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 four forms: an inflected form for the past indicative and subjunctive (looked), an inflected form for the third-person-singular present indicative (looks), an inflected form for the present participle (looking), and an uninflected form for everything else (look). While the English possessive indicator 's (as in "Jane's book") is a remnant of the Old English genitive case suffix, it is now not a suffix but a clitic. See also Declension in English. Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) is an early form of the English language that was spoken in parts of what is now England and southern Scotland between the mid-fifth century and the mid-twelfth century. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Possessive case. ... In linguistics, a clitic is an element that has some of the properties of an independent word and some more typical of a bound morpheme. ... The English language once had an extensive declension system similar to modern German or Icelandic. ...

Other Germanic languages

Old Norse was inflected, but modern Swedish, Norwegian and Danish have, like English, lost almost all inflection. Icelandic preserves almost all of the inflections of Old Norse and has added its own. Modern German remains moderately inflected, retaining four noun cases, although the genitive began falling into disuse in the late 20th century in all but formal writing, inspiring the title of the 2004 bestseller Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod ("the dative is the death of the genitive", using the dative where archaic or formal writing would use the genitive). The case system of Dutch, simpler than German's, is also becoming more simplified in common usage. Afrikaans, recognized as a distinct language in its own right rather than a Dutch dialect only in the early 20th century, has lost almost all inflection. Old Norse is the Germanic language spoken by the inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300. ... Afrikaans is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia. ...

Latin and Romance languages

The Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, French, and Romanian, are more inflectional than English, especially when it comes to verb conjugation. A single morpheme usually carries information about person, number, tense, aspect and mood, and the verb paradigm may be quite complex. Adjectives, nouns and articles are considerably less inflected, but they still have different forms according to number and grammatical gender. The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ... In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (regular alteration according to rules of grammar). ...

Latin was even more inflected; nouns and adjectives had different forms according to their grammatical case (with several patterns of declension, and three genders instead of the two found in most Romance tongues), and there were synthetic perfective and passive voice verb forms. In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause; such as the role of subject, of direct object, or of possessor. ...

East Asian languages

Some of the major Eastern Asian languages (such as the various Chinese languages, Vietnamese, and Thai) are not inflected, or show very little inflection (though they used to show more), so they are considered analytic languages (also known as isolating languages). Chinese (written) language (pinyin: zhōngw n) written in Chinese characters The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, 华语/華語, or 中文; Pinyin: H nyǔ, Hu yǔ, or Zhōngw n) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. ... An isolating language is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and are considered to be full-fledged words. By contrast, in a synthetic language, a word is composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote its syntactic meanings. ...

Japanese

Japanese shows a high degree of inflection on verbs, less so on adjectives, and very little on 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.) It has been suggested that Agglutination be merged into this article or section. ... In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word or sentence. ... In linguistics, a clitic is an element that has some of the properties of an independent word and some more typical of a bound morpheme. ... A postposition is a type of adposition, a grammatical particle that expresses some sort of relationship between a noun phrase (its object) and another part of the sentence; an adpositional phrase functions as an adjective or adverb. ...

Basque

Basque, a language isolate, is an extremely inflected language, heavily inflecting both nouns and verbs. A Basque noun is inflected in 17 different ways for case, multiplied by 4 ways for its definiteness and number. These first 68 forms are further modified based on other parts of the sentence, which in turn are inflected for the noun again. It is been estimated that at two levels of recursion, a Basque noun may have 458,683 inflected forms (Agirre et al, 1992). Verb forms are similarly complex, agreeing with the subject, the direct object and several other arguments. Basque (native name: Euskara) is the language spoken by the Basque people who inhabit the Pyrenees in North-Central Spain and the adjoining region of South-Western France. ... A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical (or genetic) relationship with other living languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common to any other language. ... Noun or noun substantive is a lexical category which is defined in terms of how its members combine with other grammatical kinds of expressions. ... See also Recursion. ... A syntactic verb argument, in linguistics, is a phrase that appears in a relationship with the verb in a proposition. ...

Auxiliary languages

Many auxiliary languages have very simple inflectional systems. Interlingua, in contrast with the Romance languages, has no irregular verb conjugations, and its verb forms are the same for all persons and numbers. It does, however, have compound verb tenses similar to those in the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages: ille ha vivite, "he has lived"; illa habeva vivite, "she had lived". Nouns are inflected by number, taking a plural -s, but rarely by gender: only when referring to a male or female being. Interlingua has no noun-adjective agreement by gender, number, or case. As a result, adjectives ordinarily have no inflections. They may take the plural form if they are being used in place of a noun: le povres, "the poor". Interlingua is an international auxiliary language (IAL) published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). ...

References and recommended reading

• Agirre, E.; Alegria I.; Arregi, X.; Artola, X.; Díaz de Ilarraza, A.; Maritxalar M.; et al. (1992). XUXEN: A spelling checker/corrector for Basque based on two-level morphology. Proceedings of the Third Conference of Applied Natural Language Processing. Online version: http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/A/A92/A92-1016.pdf
• Bauer, Laurie. (2003). Introducing linguistic morphology (2nd ed.). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. ISBN 0-87840-343-4.
• Bubenik, Vit. (1999). An introduction to the study of morphology. LINCON coursebooks in linguistics, 07. Muenchen: LINCOM Europa. ISBN 3-89586-570-2.
• Haspelmath, Martin. (2002). Understanding morphology. London: Arnold (co-published by Oxford University Press). ISBN 0340760257 (hb); ISBN 0-340-76206-5 (pbk).
• Katamba, Francis. (1993). Morphology. Modern linguistics series. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-10101-5 (hb); ISBN 0-312-10356-5 (pbk).
• Matthews, Peter. (1991). Morphology (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-41043-6 (hb); ISBN 0-521-42256-6 (pbk).
• Nichols, Johanna. (1986). Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar. Language, 62 (1), 56-119.
• De Reuse, Willem J. (1996). A practical grammar of the San Carlos Apache language. LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics 51. LINCOM. ISBN 3895868612
• Spencer, Andrew, & Zwicky, Arnold M. (Eds.) (1998). The handbook of morphology. Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-18544-5.
• Stump, Gregory T. (2001). Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure. Cambridge studies in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-78047-0.
• Van Valin, Robert D., Jr. (2001). An introduction to syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-63566-7 (pbk); ISBN 0-521-63199-8 (hb).

See also

• Agreement (linguistics)
• Synthetic language
• Morpheme
• Lexeme
• Stem (linguistics)
• Root (linguistics)
• Principal parts
• Lemma (linguistics)

In languages, agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. ... A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. ... In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest lingual unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ... Definition A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of words that are the same in basic meaning. ... This article is in need of attention. ... The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. ... In language learning, the principal parts of a verb are the series of key forms which the student has to learn by heart in order to be able to conjugate the verb through all its forms. ... In linguistics, and particularly in morphology, a lemma or citation form is the canonical form of a lexeme. ...

External links

• Inflection entry at Encyclopedia.com
• SIL: What is inflection?
• SIL: What is an inflectional affix?
• SIL: What is an inflectional category?
• SIL: What is a morphological process?
• SIL: What is derivation?
• SIL: Comparison of inflection and derivation
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Inflection, Derivation
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Conjugation, Declension
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Base, Stem, Root
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Defective Paradigm
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Strong Verb
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Inflection Phrase (IP), INFL, AGR, Tense
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Lexicalist Hypothesis

• SIL: What is an agglutinative language?

• SIL: What is a fusional language?
• SIL: What is an isolating language?
• SIL: What is a polysynthetic language?
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Agglutinating Language, Fusional Morphology, Isolating Language, Polysynthetic Language