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.
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'.
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'").
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:
★ ''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''.
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:
★
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.
| | ''Singular'' | ''Plural'' |
| ''Nom.'' | vir | vir'-ī' |
| ''Gen.'' | vir'-ī' | vir'-ōrum' |
| ''Dat.'' | vir'-ō' | vir'-īs' |
| ''Acc.'' | vir'-um' | vir'-ōs' |
| ''Abl.'' | vir'-ō' | vir'-īs' |
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''.
| ''Singular (/dual)'' | ''Plural'' |
| ''1st'' | 'wa-'hi | 'I arrive' | - |
| ''Inclusive (dual)'' | 'ų-'hi | 'you & I arrive' | 'ų-'hi'-pi' | 'we arrive' |
| ''2nd'' | 'ya-'hi | 'you arrive' | 'ya-'hi'-pi' | 'you all arrive' |
| ''3rd'' | hi | 'he arrives' | hi'-pi' | 'they arrive' |
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.
| ''Singular'' | ''Dual'' | ''Plural'' |
| ''1st'' | 'shi-'ká’ | 'on me' | 'noh-'ká’ | 'on us two' | 'da-noh-'ká’ | 'on us' |
| ''2nd'' | 'ni-'ká’ | 'on you' | 'nohwi-'ká’ | 'on you two' | 'da-nohwi-'ká’ | 'on you all' |
| ''3rd'' | 'bi-'ká’ | 'on him' | - | 'da-bi-'ká’ | 'on them' |
Traditional grammars have specific terms for inflections of nouns and verbs, but not for adpositions.
Inflection vs. derivation
Main articles: Derivation (linguistics)
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).
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.
Inflectional morphology
Main articles: 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).
Inflection is most typically realized by adding an inflectional
morpheme (that is,
affixation) to the base form (either the
root or a
stem).
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
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.
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'').
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,
Irish,
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, the
Celtic languages, and the
Romance languages) have generally retained more inflection than others (such as many
Germanic languages, with the notable exception of
Icelandic).
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.
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.
Latin and Romance languages
The
Romance languages, such as Spanish, Italian, French, and Romanian, have more inflection than English, especially in
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.
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.
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'').
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.)
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 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.
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".
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
★
Marker (linguistics)
★
Uninflected word
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
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