Inflectionele

Inflectionele is a term used in linguistic morphology to denote the set of inflectional forms that a lemma can take within a given language. It refers to the affixes, endings, or internal changes that encode grammatical information such as case, number, gender, tense, mood, aspect, person, and voice. The inflectionele of a word comprises its paradigm, the complete set of forms that realize its inflectional categories.

In many languages, inflectionele are realized as suffixes, endings, or internal alternations of vowels or consonants, which may attach to noun, adjective, or verb stems. In fusional languages like Latin or Russian, a single ending can express multiple features (case, number, gender); in agglutinative languages like Turkish or Finnish, a sequence of separate inflectionele markers marks each feature.

The study of inflectionele is central to morphology and typology. It supports lemmatization, parsing, and language learning by clarifying how a lemma changes according to syntactic role or temporal reference. The term is used mainly in descriptive linguistics and may appear in comparative works, though not all authors adopt it uniformly; some prefer terms like inflectional paradigm or inflectional form set.

Examples of inflectionele can be found in the noun paradigm of German where definite articles and case endings alter the article and adjective, or in the verb conjugation of Spanish where person, number, and tense influence verb endings are shown.

See also: inflection, morphology, lemma, paradigm, affix, conjugation.