Inflection

This article is about linguistics. For a mathematical meaning, see Stationary point.

An Inflection or inflexion is a change of word form according to grammatical function.

Those who study grammar will be familiar with inflection as it applies to some classes:

• declension, in which a noun changes or is marked due to its grammatical function (number, case, or grammatical gender)
• conjugation, in which a verb changes or is marked according to number, person (subject or object), tense (time), or mood.
• Of course, other parts of speech may also be inflected.

In some languages, inflected words do not appear in a fundamental form (the Root morpheme) except in dictionaries and grammars.

To linguists, 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 that change meaning, (i.e., creating a new word from an existing word, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (noun to verb)).

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

• affixing, or simply sticking extra bits 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 related one in a word (usually vowel sounds), for example the Ablaut process found in Germanic Strong verbs,
• stress and pitch, to change the meaning or use of a word by changing its pronunciation,
• tone used grammatically to indicate a change in meaning or grammatical case.

A schema of all inflections for a word is sometimes called a paradigm.

Relation to 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.

Inflection in various languages

All 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). 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 (only nominative and genitive case remain, outside 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.

The most obvious remaining inflections in English occur in strong verbs, e.g. I am, you are and to take, I took; and irregular nouns, one man, all men; foot, feet. Weak inflections, however, are more common, such as I love, I loved, he loves; John, John's car.

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 an agglutinative language?
• SIL: What is a fusional language?
• SIL: What is an isolating language?
• SIL: What is a polysynthetic language?
• SIL: What is a morphological process?
• SIL: What is derivation?
• SIL: Comparison of inflection and derivation
• Lexicon of Linguistics (rather technical)

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