Nominalflexion

Nominalflexion is the set of inflectional processes that apply to nouns and related forms to encode grammatical information. It covers the modification of nouns and pronouns to signal features such as case, number, and gender, and, in some languages, definiteness or possession. In languages with nominal flexion, nouns typically belong to declensions or noun classes, and affixes or internal stem changes express grammatical function within a sentence. Adjectives and determiners often agree with the noun in case, number, and gender, though languages vary in how strongly agreement is realized.

Key features include case systems, which mark syntactic roles like subject, direct object, or possession; number distinctions such as singular and plural (and sometimes dual or paucal); and gender, which may be masculine, feminine, neuter, or more complex systems in noun classes. The form of a noun can change across different grammatical forms, and these changes may extend to pronouns and, in some languages, to adjectives and determiners.

Typologically, nominal flexion is more extensive in synthetic and fusional or agglutinative languages, where multiple grammatical features are encoded in a single morpheme or in a sequence of morphemes. Analytic languages rely less on noun inflection and more on word order or separate particles. Examples of languages with rich nominal flexion include Latin, Russian, and German, while languages with little nominal inflection include English and Modern Chinese. Nominalflexion plays a central role in determining grammatical relationships and agreement within noun phrases.