Inflectioneel

Inflectioneel is a term used in linguistics to describe forms or processes that encode grammatical information through inflection. Inflection adds information such as number, person, mood, tense, voice, case, or gender to a word without creating a new lexical item. Inflectional morphemes can be suffixes, prefixes, or internal vowel changes. The concept is often contrasted with derivational morphology, where affixes or changes create a new word or shift its lexical category.

In practice, many languages exhibit inflectional patterns. In Dutch, for example, nouns form plurals (boek → boeken), pronouns reflect case-like distinctions in certain forms, verbs conjugate for tense and person (lopen → loopt), and adjectives can show inflection related to number and definiteness in noun phrases. Across languages, inflectional systems vary in complexity and type; some are highly fusional or agglutinative, while others rely more on separate function words (analytic languages).

Inflectioneel is a common label in grammar descriptions, typology, and field linguistics to classify how a language marks grammatical relations and categories through word forms. The term is often used to distinguish inflection from derivation, compounding, or lexicalization. In modern Dutch usage, inflection is a central aspect of morphology, covering noun plurals, verb conjugations, adjective endings, and pronoun forms.