Inflectors

An inflector is a linguistic element that marks grammatical information on a word, producing an inflected form. Inflectional morphemes—such as affixes, internal changes, or clitics—do not typically create new lexical meanings but adjust grammatical category like tense, number, case, mood, or gender. Inflectors can be prefixes, suffixes, infixes, or even separate words in some languages.

Inflectional systems vary across languages. In many Indo-European languages, endings attached to nouns and verbs encode features such as case or tense (for example, English plural -s, past tense -ed, or German case endings). Other languages use internal vowel changes or a combination of affixes to indicate grammatical information. Semitic languages often use nonconcatenative inflection, with patterns of vowels within a consonantal root to signal grammar.

Inflectors are typically contrasted with derivational morphemes, which create new lexical items or shift a word's meaning more broadly (for example, forming a noun from a verb). Inflectional processes may be fusional, packing several grammatical features into a single ending, or agglutinative, sequencing clear, separate morphemes for each feature. Some languages employ analytic strategies, using separate words or particles rather than affixes to express grammatical relations.

In linguistic analysis, inflectors underlie agreement and syntactic marking, enabling distinctions such as singular versus plural, nominative versus accusative, or tense and aspect in verbs. In natural language processing, inflection generation and analysis are central tasks, aiding lemmatization, parsing, and surface-form generation across languages with rich morphology.