Beygingarformum

Beygingarformum is the set of inflectional forms a word can take to express grammatical information such as number, case, gender, person, tense, mood, and definiteness. The concept is central to understanding how Icelandic words change form to fit different syntactic roles, and it covers nouns, pronouns, adjectives, numerals, and verbs. Inflectional patterns help convey who or what is being talked about, when an action takes place, and how the word relates to other words in a sentence.

For nouns and pronouns, beygingarformum reflect number (singular or plural) and case (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive). Gender influences the form of related adjectives and determiners. Adjectives themselves inflect to agree with the noun in gender, number, and definiteness, producing weak or strong forms depending on whether the noun is definite or indefinite and on the noun’s gender.

Verbs have beygingarformum for person and number (first, second, third person; singular or plural) as well as for tense (present, past, perfect, pluperfect), mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive), and voice (active or passive). Participles and other verbal forms also participate in inflection, and they can function as adjectives or in compound verbal constructions. Irregularities exist, and some verb classes exhibit characteristic patterns of endings.

In practice, beygingarformum are essential in grammar, dictionaries, and language teaching. They are also a focus in natural language processing and computational linguistics, where morphological analysis and generation rely on recognizing and producing the correct inflected forms for accurate parsing and generation.