Avbøying

Avbøying, in linguistic terms, refers to the systematic modification of a word to express grammatical categories. It is a central aspect of morphology and contrasts with processes that create new words through derivation or compounding. Avbøying encompasses the inflectional changes a word undergoes to signal features such as tense, number, gender, case, mood, or definiteness, depending on the language.

The process covers several parts of speech. For nouns, avbøying marks number (singular vs. plural) and sometimes definiteness. For adjectives, it involves agreement with the noun in gender, number, and definiteness. For verbs, avbøying encodes tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number; some languages also distinguish imperative forms or subjunctive moods. Many languages have regular inflection patterns, while others have irregular or stem-changing forms, and some rely on suppletion for certain forms.

In Norwegian, the concept is reflected in noun, adjective, and verb inflection. Nouns show indefiniteness and definiteness through articles or suffixes, and number through plural forms. Adjectives agree with the noun in gender and number, and may shift form before definite nouns. Verbs conjugate for tense and aspect, with auxiliary constructions used for compound tenses. Norwegian also exhibits some irregular inflections and dialectal variation between Bokmål and Nynorsk.

Applications of avbøying include dictionary compilation, language teaching, and computational linguistics, where accurate inflection models are essential for parsing and generation. While the term avbøying appears in technical linguistic discussions, everyday usage in Norwegian more commonly uses bøying to refer to inflection in general.