Inflection

In linguistic morphology, inflection (or 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''.

An inflection expresses grammatical categories with affixation (such as prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, and transfix), apophony (as Indo-European ablaut), or other modifications. For example, the Latin verb ', meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix ', expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense-mood (future indicative or present subjunctive). The use of this suffix is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word ''lead'' is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense; it is simply the bare form of a verb. The inflected form of a word often contains both one or more free morphemes (a unit of meaning which can stand by itself as a word), and one or more bound morphemes (a unit of meaning which cannot stand alone as a word). For example, the English word ''cars'' is a noun that is inflected for number, specifically to express the plural; the content morpheme ''car'' is unbound because it could stand alone as a word, while the suffix ''-s'' is bound because it cannot stand alone as a word. These two morphemes together form the inflected word ''cars''.

Words that are never subject to inflection are said to be invariant; for example, the English verb ''must'' is an invariant item: it never takes a suffix or changes form to signify a different grammatical category. Its categories can be determined only from its context. Languages that seldom make use of inflection, such as English, are said to be analytic. Analytic languages that do not make use of derivational morphemes, such as Standard Chinese, are said to be isolating.

Requiring the forms or inflections of more than one word in a sentence to be compatible with each other according to the rules of the language is known as concord or agreement. For example, in "the man jumps", "man" is a singular noun, so "jump" is constrained in the present tense to use the third person singular suffix "s".

Languages that have some degree of inflection are synthetic languages. These can be highly inflected (such as Latin, Greek, Biblical Hebrew, and Sanskrit), or slightly inflected (such as English, Dutch, Persian). Languages that are so inflected that a sentence can consist of a single highly inflected word (such as many Native American languages) are called polysynthetic languages. Languages in which each inflection conveys only a single grammatical category, such as Finnish, are known as agglutinative languages, while languages in which a single inflection can convey multiple grammatical roles (such as both nominative case and plural, as in Latin and German) are called fusional.

Examples in English

In English most 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).

There are nine inflectional affixes in the English language.

Despite the march toward regularization, modern English retains traces of its ancestry, with a minority of its words still using inflection by ablaut (sound change, mostly in verbs) and umlaut (a particular type of sound change, mostly in nouns), as well as long-short vowel alternation. For example:

* ''Write, wrote, written'' (marking by ablaut variation, and also suffixing in the participle)
* ''Sing, sang, sung'' (ablaut)
* ''Foot, feet'' (marking by umlaut variation)
* ''Mouse, mice'' (umlaut)
* ''Child, children'' (ablaut, and also suffixing in the plural)

For details, see English plural, English verbs, and English irregular verbs.

Regular and irregular inflection

When a given word class is subject to inflection in a particular language, there are generally one or more standard patterns of inflection (the ''paradigms'' described below) that words in that class may follow. Words which follow such a standard pattern are said to be regular; those that inflect differently are called irregular.

For instance, many languages that feature verb inflection have both regular verbs and irregular verbs. In English, regular verbs form their past tense and past participle with the ending ''- ''. Therefore, verbs like ''play'', ''arrive'' and ''enter'' are regular, while verbs like ''sing'', ''keep'' and ''go'' are irregular. Irregular verbs often preserve patterns that were regular in past forms of the language, but which have now become anomalous; in rare cases, there are regular verbs that were irregular in past forms of the language. (For more details see English verbs and English irregular verbs.)

Other types of irregular inflected form include irregular plural nouns, such as the English ''mice'', ''children'' and ''women'' (see English plural) and the French ' (the plural of ', "eye"); and irregular comparative and superlative forms of adjectives or adverbs, such as the English ''better'' and ''best'' (which correspond to the positive form ''good'' or ''well'').

Irregularities can have four basic causes:

# euphony: Regular inflection would result in forms that sound esthetically unpleasing or are difficult to pronounce (English ''far'' → ''farther'' or ''further,'' Spanish ' → ', ' vs. ' → ', '','' Portuguese vs. Spanish ' → Portuguese ' vs. Spanish ').
# principal parts: These are generally considered to have been formed independently of one another, so the student must memorize them when learning a new word. Example: Latin ' → Spanish '.
# strong vs. weak inflection: In some cases, two inflection systems exist, conventionally classified as "strong" and "weak." For instance, English and German have weak verbs that form the past tense and past participle by adding an ending (English ''jump'' → ''jumped,'' German ' → ') and strong verbs that change vowel, and in some cases form the past participle by adding ' (English ''swim'' → ''swam,'' ''swum,'' German ' → ', '). Ancient Greek verbs are likewise said to have had a first aorist () and a second aorist ().
# suppletion: The "irregular" form was originally derived from a different root (English ''person'' → ''people''). The comparative and superlative forms of ''good'' in many languages display this phenomenon.

For more details on some of the considerations that apply to regularly and irregularly inflected forms, see the article on regular and irregular verbs.

Declension and conjugation

Two traditional grammatical terms refer to inflections of specific word classes:

* Inflecting a noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, article or determiner is known as declining it. The forms may express number, case, gender or degree of comparison.
* Inflecting a verb is called conjugating it. The forms may express tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, or number.

An organized list of the inflected forms of a given lexeme or root word is called its ''declension'' if it is a noun, or its ''conjugation'' if it is a verb.

Below is the declension of the English pronoun ''I'', which is inflected for case and number.

The pronoun ''who'' is also inflected according to case. Its declension is defective, in the sense that it lacks a reflexive form.

The following table shows the conjugation of the verb ''to arrive'' in the indicative mood: suffixes inflect it for person, number, and tense:

The non-finite forms ''arrive'' (bare infinitive), ''arrived'' (past participle) and ''arriving'' (gerund/present participle), although not inflected for person or number, can also be regarded as part of the conjugation of the verb ''to arrive''. Compound verb forms, such as ''I have arrived'', ''I had arrived'', or ''I will arrive'', can be included also in the conjugation of the verb for didactic purposes, but they are not overt inflections of ''arrive''. The formula for deriving the covert form, in which the relevant inflections do not occur in the main verb, is

:pronoun + conjugated auxiliary verb + non-finite form of main verb.

Inflectional paradigm

An inflectional paradigm refers to a pattern (usually a set of inflectional endings), where a class of words follow the same pattern. Nominal inflectional paradigms are called ''declensions'', and verbal inflectional paradigms are termed ''conjugations''. For instance, there are five types of Latin declension. Words that belong to the first declension usually end in ''-a'' and are usually feminine. These words share a common inflectional framework. In Old English, nouns are divided into two major categories of declension, the ''strong'' and ''weak'' ones, as shown below:

The terms "strong declension" and "weak declension" are primarily relevant to well-known dependent-marking languages (such as the Indo-European languages, or Japanese). In dependent-marking languages, nouns in adpositional (prepositional or postpositional) phrases can carry inflectional morphemes.

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:

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

Compared to derivation

Inflection is the process of adding ''inflectional morphemes'' that modify a verb's tense, mood, aspect, voice, person, or number or a noun's case, gender, or number, rarely affecting the word's meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -''s'' to the root ''dog'' to form ''dogs'' and adding -''ed'' to ''wait'' to form ''waited''.

In contrast, derivation is the process of adding ''derivational morphemes'', which create a new word from existing words and change the semantic meaning or the part of speech of the affected word, such as by changing a noun to a verb.

Distinctions between verbal moods are mainly indicated by derivational morphemes.

Words are rarely listed in dictionaries on the basis of their inflectional morphemes (in which case they would be lexical items). However, they often are listed on the basis of their derivational morphemes. For instance, English dictionaries list ''readable'' and ''readability'', words with derivational suffixes, along with their root ''read''. However, no traditional English dictionary lists ''book'' as one entry and ''books'' as a separate entry; the same goes for ''jump'' and ''jumped''.

Inflectional morphology

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;
* 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.

Inflection through reduplication

Reduplication is a morphological process where a constituent is repeated. The direct repetition of a word or root is called ''total reduplication'' (or ''full reduplication''). The repetition of a segment is referred to as ''partial reduplication''. Reduplication can serve both derivational and inflectional functions. A few examples are given below:

Inflection through tone change

Palancar and Léonard provided an example with Tlatepuzco Chinantec (an Oto-Manguean language spoken in Southern Mexico), where tones are able to distinguish mood, person, and number:

Case can be distinguished with tone as well, as in Maasai language (a Nilo-Saharan language spoken in Kenya and Tanzania) (Hyman, 2016):

In various languages

Indo-European languages (fusional)

Because the Proto-Indo-European language was highly inflected, all of its descendant Indo-European languages, such as Albanian, Armenian, English, German, Ukrainian, Russian, Persian, Kurdish, Italian, Irish, Spanish, French, Hindi, Marathi, Urdu

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