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, case, or person. Grammar is the field of Linguistics that covers the Rules governing the use of any given natural language. For other meanings see the disambiguation page Marker In Linguistics, a marker is a free or bound Morpheme that indicates For its use in the context of Computer Science see Lexical analysis. In Linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called Noun classes are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words every noun must belong Grammatical tense is a temporal linguistic quality expressing the time at during or over which a state or action denoted by a verb occurs In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" In Grammar, the case of a Noun or Pronoun indicates its Grammatical function in a greater Phrase or Clause; such as the Grammatical person, in Linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event such as the speaker the Addressee, or others 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. For its use in the context of Computer Science see Lexical analysis. In Linguistics a lemma (plural lemmas or lemmata) has two distinct interpretations morphology / Lexicography: the

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"). In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" An affix is a Morpheme that is attached to a stem to form a word Grammatical tense is a temporal linguistic quality expressing the time at during or over which a state or action denoted by a verb 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. In Linguistics, the term ablaut designates a system of Vowel gradation (i In Linguistics, umlaut (from German um - "around"/"the other way" + Laut "sound" is a process whereby a 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. In Linguistics, a participle (from Latin participium, a Calque of Greek μετοχη "partaking" is a derivative of a non-finite Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. 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 the umlaut and ablaut are widespread, while in English they are generally considered as exceptions. The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages.

Declension and conjugation

Main articles: Declension and Grammatical conjugation

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

• Nominals: nouns, and often pronouns, adjectives, and determiners as well; often involving number, case, and/or gender; and
• Verbs, often involving tense, mood, voice, and/or aspect, as well as agreement with one or more arguments in number, gender, and/or person. In Linguistics, declension (or declination) is the occurrence of Inflection in Nouns Pronouns and Adjectives indicating In Linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a Verb, Noun or Adjective from its Principal parts by Inflection In Grammar, a lexical category (also word class, lexical class, or in traditional grammar part of speech) is a linguistic category of words (or In Linguistics and Grammar, a pronoun is a Pro-form that substitutes for a (including a noun phrase consisting of a single Noun) with or In Grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a Noun or Pronoun, giving more information about the In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" In Grammar, the case of a Noun or Pronoun indicates its Grammatical function in a greater Phrase or Clause; such as the In Linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called Noun classes are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words every noun must belong For English usage of verbs see the wiki article English verbs. Grammatical tense is a temporal linguistic quality expressing the time at during or over which a state or action denoted by a verb occurs Grammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive Verb forms that are used to signal modality. In Grammar, the voice (also called gender or diathesis of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state that the verb expresses and the participants identified In Linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a Verb defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof in the described event or state In Languages agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase A syntactic verb argument, in Linguistics, is a Phrase that appears in a relationship with the Verb in a Clause. Grammatical person, in Linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event such as the speaker the Addressee, or others

Inflecting a nominal word is known as declining it, while inflecting a verb is called conjugating it. An organized list of the inflected forms of a given lexeme is also called its inflection, declension, or conjugation, as the case may be. In Linguistics, declension (or declination) is the occurrence of Inflection in Nouns Pronouns and Adjectives indicating In Linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a Verb, Noun or Adjective from its Principal parts by Inflection

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

The pronoun who is also inflected in conservative English, though only according to case. In Linguistics, a subjective pronoun is a Personal pronoun that is used as the subject of a sentence An objective pronoun in Grammar functions as the target of a Verb, as distinguished from a Subjective pronoun, which is the initiator of a verb A possessive pronoun is a Part of speech that attributes ownership to someone or something One can say that 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. Grammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive Verb forms that are used to signal modality. It is inflected for person, number, and tense by suffixation. In Grammar, a suffix (also postfix, ending) is an Affix which is placed at the end of a word

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. Grammatical tense is a temporal linguistic quality expressing the time at during or over which a state or action denoted by a verb occurs In Linguistics, a non-finite verb (or a verbal) is a Verb form that is not limited by a subject and more generally is not fully inflected by Compound verb forms like I have arrived, I had arrived, or I will arrive can be included also in the conjugation of this verb for didactical purposes, but are not conjugations of arrive in the strictest morphological sense. In Linguistics, a compound verb or complex predicate is a multi- Word compound that acts as a single Verb. Rather, they should be analysed as complex verb phrases with the structure

pronoun + conjugated auxiliary verb + non-finite form of main verb. In Grammar, a phrase is a group of Words that functions as a single unit in the Syntax of a sentence. In Linguistics, an auxiliary (also called helping verb, helper verb, auxiliary verb, or verbal auxiliary) is a Verb functioning

A class of words with similar inflection rules is called an inflectional paradigm. Nominal inflectional paradigms are also called declensions, and verbal inflectional paradigms are called conjugations. For example, in Old English nouns could be divided into two major declensions, the strong and the weak, inflected as is shown below:

These two terms, however, seem to be biased toward well-known dependent-marking languages (such as the Indo-European languages, or Japanese). In Grammar, the case of a Noun or Pronoun indicates its Grammatical function in a greater Phrase or Clause; such as the A dependent-marking Language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a Phrase tend to be placed on the is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities In dependent-marking languages, nouns in adpositional phrases can carry inflectional morphemes. (Adpositions include prepositions and postpositions. In Grammar, a preposition is a Part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase. ) In head-marking languages, the adpositions can carry the inflection in adpositional phrases. 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 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. Western Apache refers to the similar Apache peoples living primarily in east central Arizona. San Carlos ( Western Apache: Sengaa) is a Census-designated place (CDP in Gila County, Arizona, United States.

Traditional grammars have specific terms for inflections of nouns and verbs, but not for those of adpositions. In Grammar, a preposition is a Part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase.

Inflection vs. derivation

Main article: 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). In Linguistics, derivation is "Used to form new words as with happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. 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. 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

Main article: Inflectional morphology

Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called inflectional languages. Inflectional morphology is a part of the study of Linguistics. 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). An affix is a Morpheme that is attached to a stem to form a word Reduplication, in Linguistics, is a morphological Process by which the root or stem of a Word, or part of it is repeated In Linguistics, an alternation is the phenomenon of a Phoneme or Morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization In Linguistics, the term ablaut designates a system of Vowel gradation (i In Linguistics, umlaut (from German um - "around"/"the other way" + Laut "sound" is a process whereby a
• 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. In Linguistics, prosody (from Greek προσωδία) is the Rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech In Linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain Syllables in a word Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a Syllable A tonal language is a language that uses tone to distinguish words For an example, see Initial-stress-derived noun. Initial-stress derivation is a phonological process in English, wherein Verbs become Nouns or Adjectives when the stress is

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). In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. An affix is a Morpheme that is attached to a stem to form a word 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 In Linguistics, a stem (sometimes also theme) is the part of a word that is common to all its inflected variants

Relation to morphological typology

Main article: morphological typology

Inflection is sometimes confused with synthesis in languages. Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see Linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common morphological structures A synthetic language, in Linguistic typology, is a Language with a high Morpheme -per- word ratio 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. Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see Linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common morphological structures In morphological typology (in linguistics an isolating language (also analytic language) is any Language in which words are composed of A synthetic language, in Linguistic typology, is a Language with a high Morpheme -per- word ratio 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. In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. 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 Uralic languages (jʊˈrælɨk constitute a language family of 39 Languages spoken by approximately 20 million people Finno-Ugric (ˌfɪnoʊˈjuːgɹɪk is a grouping of languages in the Uralic language family comprising Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and The Samoyedic languages are spoken on both sides of the Ural mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by perhaps 30000 speakers altogether An agglutinative language is a Language that uses Agglutination extensively most Words are formed by joining Morphemes together Proto-Uralic is the hypothetical language ancestral to the Uralic Language family, which includes Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic. The largest languages are Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian, all European Union official languages. The European Union ( EU) is a political and economic union of twenty-seven member states, located primarily in 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. Consonant gradation is a type of Consonant mutation, in which consonants alternate between various "grades" 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). The accusative case ( abbreviated ACC) of a Noun is the Grammatical case used to mark the Direct object of a Transitive

Indo-European languages

All Indo-European languages, such as Albanian, English, German, Russian, Persian (Fârsi), Italian, Spanish, French, Sanskrit, and Hindi are inflected to a greater or lesser extent. Albanian (sq ''Gjuha shqipe'' ˈɟuha ˈʃcipɛ is an Indo-European language spoken by nearly 6 million peoplewhile others claim that it derives from Daco - English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. Russian ( transliteration:,) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people Sanskrit (sa संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk, for short sa संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam) is a historical Hindi ( Devanāgarī: hi [[wiktहिन्दी हिन्दी]] or hi [[wiktहिंदी हिंदी]] IAST:, IPA:) is 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. Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Irish (ga ''Gaeilge'' is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish. Latvian language (latviešu valoda is the official state language of Latvia. Lithuanian ( lietuvių kalba) is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognised as one of the official languages of the European Union. Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly Sanskrit (sa संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk, for short sa संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam) is a historical Deflexion caused newer languages such as English and French to lose much of their historical inflection. Deflexion is a linguistic process related to Inflectional languages Afrikaans, an extremely young language, is almost completely uninflected and borders on being analytic. Afrikaans is an Indo-European language, derived from 17th century Dutch and classified as Low Franconian Germanic, mainly spoken in In morphological typology (in linguistics an isolating language (also analytic language) is any Language in which words are composed of 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). The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages) a group of closely related Languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic" a branch of the greater Indo-European Language family. The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European (IE Language family. Icelandic ( is a North Germanic language, the language of Iceland.

English

Old English was a moderately inflected language, using an extensive case system similar to that of modern Icelandic or German. Icelandic ( is a North Germanic language, the language of Iceland. The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. 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. In Grammar, the genitive case or possessive case (also called the second case) is the case that marks a Noun as modifying another In Linguistics, a clitic is a grammatically independent and phonologically dependent Word. See also Declension in English. Old English nouns were declined – that is the ending of the noun changed to reflect its function in the sentence

Other Germanic languages

Old Norse was inflected, but modern Swedish, Norwegian and Danish have, like English, lost almost all inflection. Old Norse is the North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age Swedish ( is a North Germanic language spoken by more than nine million people predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the Norwegian ( norsk) is a North Germanic Language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is an official language Danish ( d̥ænsɡ̊ is one of the North Germanic languages (also called Scandinavian languages a sub-group of the Germanic branch of the Icelandic preserves almost all of the inflections of Old Norse and has added its own. Icelandic ( is a North Germanic language, the language of Iceland. Modern German remains moderately inflected, retaining four noun cases, although the genitive had already began falling into disuse in all but formal writing in Early New High German, 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 German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. The case system of Dutch, simpler than German's, is also becoming more simplified in common usage. Dutch ( is a West Germanic language spoken by around 24 million people 22 million of which are from the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname 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. Afrikaans is an Indo-European language, derived from 17th century Dutch and classified as Low Franconian Germanic, mainly spoken in

Latin and Romance languages

The Romance languages, such as Spanish, Italian, French, and Romanian, have more inflection than English, especially in verb conjugation. The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all In Linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a Verb, Noun or Adjective from its Principal parts by Inflection 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. In Grammar, the case of a Noun or Pronoun indicates its Grammatical function in a greater Phrase or Clause; such as the

Slavic Languages

The Slavic Languages, including Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Ukranian, Bulgarian, and Slovenian among others, all make use of a high degree of inflection, typically having six or seven cases and three genders. The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages) a group of closely related Languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages Russian ( transliteration:,) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages Polish ( język polski, polszczyzna) is the Official language of Poland. Czech (ˈʧɛk čeština ˈʧɛʃcɪna in Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers it is the majority language in the The Slovak language ( slovenčina, slovenský jazyk, not to be confused with Slovenščina) sometimes referred to as "Slovakian" Croatian language ( hrvatski jezik) is a South Slavic language which is used primarily in Croatia, by Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina in neighbouring Bosnian language (Bosnian bosanski jezik) sometimes referred as Bosniak language or Bosniac language is a South Slavic language native Serbian (sr-Cyrl српски језик sr-Latn ''srpski jezik'' is a South Slavic language, Ukrainian (in Ukrainian украї́нська мо́ва ukrayins'ka mova,) is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. Bulgarian (български език IPA: ɛzˈik is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group Slovene or Slovenian ( slovenski jezik or slovenščina, not to be confused with Slovenčina) is a South Slavic language Many Slavic languages include a vocative case for interjections and exclamations, and Slovenian uses a rare third number, (in addition to singular and plural numbers) known as duality. Dual is a Grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and Plural. In addition, in some Slavic languages, such as Polish, word stems are frequently modified by the addition or absence of endings, resulting in consonant and vowel alternation.

Semitic languages

Arabic

Arabic (more precisely Literary/Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) (اللغة العربية الفصحى) is a moderately-inflected language. Literary Arabic (ar اللغة العربية الفصحى "the Eloquent Arabic language" or Standard Arabic is the literary and standard variety It uses a complex system of pronouns and their respective prefixes and suffixes for verb, noun, adjective and possessive conjugation.

The following table is an example of present-tense case applications in Arabic:

* note: a long tatwiil ( ـــــــــــــــــــــ ) indicates where the verb stem would be placed in order to conjugate it. Kashida ( Arabic كشيدة) is a type of justification used in some Cursive scripts particularly Arabic.

Arabic regional dialects (e. See Arabic languages for the historical family of dialects The Arabic language is a Semitic language with many varieties g. Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Gulf Arabic), used for everyday communication, tend to have less inflection than the more formal Literary Arabic. Morocco (المغرب "al-Maghrib" officially the Kingdom of Morocco (المملكة المغربية is a country located in North Africa This article is about the country of Egypt For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Egypt topics. The Persian Gulf, in the Southwest Asian region is an extension of the For example, in Jordanian Arabic, the second- and third-person feminine plurals (أنتنّ and هنّ) and their respective unique conjugations are lost and replaced by the masculine (أنتم and هم). Jordan, officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (الأردنّ al-Urdunn) is an Arab country in Southwest Asia spanning the southern

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). Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ) formerly known under French colonization as Annamese ( see Annam) Thai (th ภาษาไทย, transcription: phasa thai, transliteration:; pʰāːsǎːtʰāj is the national and In morphological typology (in linguistics an isolating language (also analytic language) is any Language in which words are composed of

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. is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities An agglutinative language is a Language that uses Agglutination extensively most Words are formed by joining Morphemes together Formally, every noun phrase must be marked for case, but this is done by invariable particles (clitic postpositions). For other meanings see the disambiguation page Marker In Linguistics, a marker is a free or bound Morpheme that indicates In Linguistics, a clitic is a grammatically independent and phonologically dependent Word. In Grammar, a preposition is a Part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase. (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. )

Chinese

The Chinese family of languages, in general, does not possess inflectional morphology. Chinese words are generally comprised of one or two syllables, each of which correspond to a written character and individual morpheme. Since most morphemes are monosyllabic in Chinese languages,^[1] Chinese is quite resistant to inflectional changes; instead, Chinese has its other methods of achieving grammatical fluency.

While many European languages use inflection or declension to mark words' function in a particular sentence, the Chinese languages use word order as a grammatical marking system. Whereas in English the first-person singular nominative "I" changes to "me" when used in the accusative - that is, when "I" is the object of a verb - Chinese simply uses the word order to mark such a distinction. An example from Mandarin: wǒ gěi tā yī běn shū 'I gave him a book'. Here wǒ means 'I' and tā means 'him'. However, 'He gave me a book' would be: tā gěi wǒ yī běn shū. Wǒ and Tā simply change places in the sentence to indicate that their case has switched: there is no inflection or change in the form of the words. In classical Chinese, different pronouns were used in different cases. However, these are no longer used; most of the alternative pronouns are considered archaic in modern Mandarin Chinese. Classically, 我 wǒ was used solely as the first person accusative. 吾 Wú was generally used as the first person nominative. ^[2]

Basque

Basque, a language isolate, is an extremely inflected language, heavily inflecting both nouns and verbs. Basque ( native name: euskara) is the Language spoken by the Basque people who inhabit the Pyrenees in North-Central Spain A language isolate, in the absolute sense is a Natural language with no demonstrable genealogical (or "genetic" relationship with other living languages that is 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. Recursion, in Mathematics and Computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition ^[3] Verb forms are similarly complex, agreeing with the subject, the direct object and several other arguments. A syntactic verb argument, in Linguistics, is a Phrase that appears in a relationship with the Verb in a Clause.

Auxiliary languages

Many auxiliary languages have very simple inflectional systems. Ido for instance has a different form for each verbal tense (past, present, future, volitive and imperative) plus an infinitive, and both a present and past participle. Ido (ˈiːdoʊ is a Constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier There are though no inflections for person or number and all verbs are regular.

Nouns are marked for number (singular and plural), and the accusative case may be shown in certain situations, typically when the direct object of a sentence precedes its verb. On the other hand, adjectives are unmarked for gender, number or case (unless they stand on their own, without a noun, in which case they take on the same desinences as the missing noun would have taken). The definite article "la" ("the") remains unaltered regardless of gender or case, and also of number, except when there is no other word to show plurality. Pronouns are identical in all cases, though exceptionally the accusative case may be marked, as for nouns.

Interlingua, in contrast with the Romance languages, has no irregular verb conjugations, and its verb forms are the same for all persons and numbers. Interlingua is an International auxiliary language (IAL developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA 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".

Notes

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.
• Norman, Jerry. (1988). Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29653-6 (pbk).
• 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)
• Lexeme
• Marker (linguistics)
• Morpheme
• Periphrasis
• Suppletion
• Synthetic language
• Uninflected word
• Weak suppletion

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