Inflektionsform

Inflektionsform is a specific morphological form of a word that encodes grammatical information through inflection. It is the exact form used in context, as opposed to the lemma or dictionary form of the word.

In many languages, different word classes have inflectional systems. Nouns and pronouns inflect for features such as gender, number, and case; verbs inflect for person, number, tense, mood, and voice; adjectives may inflect for degree and for the definiteness and syntactic role of the noun they modify. The complete set of inflected forms for a word is called its paradigm or conjugation/declension pattern. Inflection can be regular or irregular and is often marked by affixes, though some languages also employ stem changes (ablaut) or internal vowel alternations.

Examples help illustrate inflektionsform. In German, the noun Hund has forms such as der Hund (nominative singular), des Hundes (genitive singular), dem Hund (dative singular), den Hund (accusative singular); in plural: die Hunde (nominative), der Hunde (genitive), den Hunden (dative), die Hunde (accusative). A verb like gehen yields ich gehe, du gehst, er geht, wir gehen, ihr geht, sie gehen; past tense: ging; past participle: gegangen. An adjective changes its ending depending on the article and case, as in großer Mann versus der große Mann. These forms together realize grammatical relations in sentences.

Inflektion differs from derivation: inflective changes do not create new lexical meanings but signal grammar, while derivation produces new words or word classes. Inflektionsformen are a central feature of many morphologically rich languages and are essential for understanding sentence structure and agreement.