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. The concept of a "word" independent of the different inflections is called a lexeme, and the form of a word that is considered to not have any inflections is called a lemma. 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 genders, also called noun classes, are classes of nouns requiring different agreement forms on determiners, adjectives, verbs or other words. ... Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. ... 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 is the canonical form of a lexeme. ...

Declension and conjugation

Those who study grammar may be familiar with two traditional grammatical terms that refer to inflectional paradigms of specific word classes: Since the late 1800s, the word paradigm (IPA: ) has referred to a thought pattern in any scientific discipline or other epistemological context. ... 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: noun inflectional paradigm (often includes pronouns, adjectives, and demonstratives as well) (often involving number, case, or grammatical gender).

• Conjugation: verb inflectional paradigm (often involving number, person, tense, or mood).

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 a feature of inflected languages: generally, the alteration of a noun to indicate its grammatical role. ... A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech (a word or phrase) that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. ... In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase with or without a determiner, such as you and they in English. ... An adjective is a part of speech which modifies a noun, usually making its meaning more specific. ... Demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to, and distinguishes those entities from others. ... Number, in linguistics, is a grammatical category used to express the quantity of objects referred to by a noun. ... In linguistics, declension is a feature of inflected languages: generally, the alteration of a noun to indicate its grammatical role. ... In linguistics, grammatical genders, also called noun classes, are classes of nouns requiring different agreement forms on determiners, adjectives, verbs or other words. ... 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). ... A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... Number, in linguistics, is a grammatical category used to express the quantity of objects referred to by a noun. ... Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to the participant role of a referent, such as the speaker, the addressee, and others. ... Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. ... In linguistics, many grammars have the concept of grammatical mood, which describes the relationship of a verb with reality and intent. ... Latin is an Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ...

Below is a conjugation of the verb hi 'arrive' in Lakhota. It is inflected for person with prefixes and for number with the suffix -pi. The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun. ... The genitive case is a grammatical case that indicates a relationship, primarily one of possession, between the noun in the genitive case and another noun. ... The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given. ... The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a verb. ... For the physical process, see ablation. ... Lakota is a language spoken by the Native American Lakota people. ...

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 inflectional paradigms involving 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. ... In grammar, an adposition is a word or affix which shows a words grammatical function. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with adposition. ... 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. ... 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 noun and verb paradigms but not for adpositional paradigms.

Inflection vs. derivation

Inflection 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, which create a new word from an existing word, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (e.g., changing a noun to a verb). 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 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:

• affixing, 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).
• stress, pitch and tone, where no sounds are added or changed but the intonation and relative strength of each sound is altered regularly.

A schema of all inflections for a word is sometimes called a paradigm. An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a base morpheme such as a root or to a stem, to form a word. ... 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. ... Ä ä Ö ö Ãœ ü The term umlaut is used for two closely related notions: a special kind of vowel modification and a particular diacritic mark. ... A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech (a word or phrase) that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. ... 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. ... For pitch accent in music, see: accent (music). ... Tone refers to the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. ... The word schema comes from the Greek word σχήμα (skhēma) that means shape or more generally plan. ... Since the late 1800s, the word paradigm (IPA: ) has referred to a thought pattern in any scientific discipline or other epistemological context. ...

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). In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest language unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ... Affixation occurs when a bound morpheme is attached to a root morpheme. ... 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

Inflection is sometimes confused with synthesis in languages. The two terms are related but not the same. Morphological typology was developed by brothers Friedrich and August von Schlegel. ... A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-to-word ratio. ...

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. ... An analytic language (or isolating language) is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and 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-to-word ratio. ... In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest language unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ...

Inflection in various languages

Highly inflected language families

The Dravidian languages are highly inflected, as well as the Finno-Ugric languages and many Native American languages. The Dravidian family of languages includes approximately 26 languages that are mainly spoken in southern India and Sri Lanka, as well as certain areas in Pakistan, Nepal, and eastern and central India. ... Geographical distribution of Finno-Ugric (Finno-Permic in blue, Ugric in green). ... Native American languages are the indigenous languages of the Americas, spoken by Native Americans from the southern tip of South America to Alaska and Greenland. ...

Indo-European languages

All Indo-European languages, such as English, German, Russian, Spanish, French, Sanskrit, and Hindi are inflected to a greater or lesser extent. In general, older Indo-European languages such as Latin, Latvian, and Lithuanian are moderately inflected. Newer languages such as English and French have lost much of their historical inflection. Afrikaans, an extremely young language, is almost completely uninflected and borders on being analytic. Some branches of Indo-European (e.g. the Slavic languages) seem to have generally retained more inflection than others (e.g. Romance languages). The Indo-European languages include some 443 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects, including most of the major language families of Europe, as well as many languages of Southwest and South Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The Sanskrit language (Skt. ... Hindi (हिन्दी) is a language spoken mainly in North and Central India. ... Latin is an Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ... Afrikaans is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia. ... An analytic language (or isolating language) is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and 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 or New Latin languages, are a subset of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Latin dialects spoken by the common people in what is known as Latin Europe (Italian/Portuguese/Spanish Europa latina, Catalan Europa llatina, French Europe latine, Romanian Europa...

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 three forms: an inflected form for the past indicative and subjunctive (looked), an inflected form for the third-person-singular present indicative (looks), 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. ... The genitive case is a grammatical case that indicates a relationship, primarily one of possession, between the noun in the genitive case and another noun. ... In linguistics, a clitic is a word that syntactically functions as a free morpheme, but phonetically appears as a bound morpheme; it is always pronounced with a following or preceding word. ... 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 many of the inflections of Old Norse. 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. 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. This is the approximate extent of Old Norse and related languages in the early 10th century. ... Afrikaans is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia. ...

East Asian 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). 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 analytic language (or isolating language) is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and 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, a probable language isolate, 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.) A language isolate 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. ... An agglutinative language is a language in which the words are formed by joining morphemes together. ... 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 a word that syntactically functions as a free morpheme, but phonetically appears as a bound morpheme; it is always pronounced with a following or preceding word. ... 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, another language isolate, is an extremely inflected polysynthetic 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's 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. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... A language isolate 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. ... Polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i. ... A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech (a word or phrase) that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. ... In mathematics and computer science, recursion specifies (or constructs) a class of objects (or an object from a certain class) by defining a few very simple base cases (often just one), and then defining rules to break down complex cases into simpler cases. ... A syntactic verb argument, in linguistics, is a phrase that appears in a relationship with the verb in a proposition. ...

Examples

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"). Number, in linguistics, is a grammatical category used to express the quantity of objects referred to by a noun. ... An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a base morpheme such as a root or to a stem, to form a word. ... 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 (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. ... Ä ä Ö ö Ü ü The term umlaut is used for two closely related notions: a special kind of vowel modification and a particular diacritic mark. ...

• 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)

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).

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. The former words were never frequently used, although many English users continue to use Latin endings today in somewhat more common constructions such as actress and waitress. Latin is an Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ...

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 languages

The Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian 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. 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/. The Romance languages, also called Romanic languages or New Latin languages, are a subset of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Latin dialects spoken by the common people in what is known as Latin Europe (Italian/Portuguese/Spanish Europa latina, Catalan Europa llatina, French Europe latine, Romanian Europa...

Latin is in fact more complicated, showing Ablaut in the verb paradigm, and also some verb inflection for voice (which is realized only by syntactic means in its daughter languages), as well as a more complicated noun paradigm (with several patterns of declension, and three genders instead of the two found in most Romance tongues).

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

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 0-878-40343-4.
• 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 0-340-76025-7 (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. (forthcoming). A practical grammar of the San Carlos Apache language.
• 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).