Information AboutInflection |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT INFLECTION | |
| linguistic morphology | |
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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:
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 Class es:
Below is an example of a noun declension of the Latin noun ''vir'' 'man'. It is inflected for case and number with suffixes. 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''. However, these two terms seem to be biased toward well-known Dependent-marking Language s (such as Spanish, Latin, German, Russian, Japanese etc.). In dependent-marking languages, nouns in adpositional phrases can carry inflectional morphemes. ( Adposition s include prepositions and postpositions.) In Head-marking Language s, 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 adpositions. INFLECTION VS. DERIVATION See Also: 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 See Also: Inflectional morphology Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called ''inflectional languages''. Morphemes may be added in several different ways:
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, Affix ation) 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 Morpheme s, 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 Language s, 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.
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 Language s, the Celtic Language s, and the Romance Language s) have generally retained more inflection than others (such as many Germanic Languages , with the notable exception of Icelandic ). English 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 Language s, Vietnamese , and Thai ) are not inflected, or show very little inflection (though they used to show more), so they are considered Analytic Language s (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 Postposition s). (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 s. 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
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