Ragozó

Ragozó is a linguistic term used in some languages to denote an element that produces or participates in inflection, i.e., the modification of a word form to express grammatical categories such as tense, mood, person, number, case, or gender. In Hungarian grammar, the base noun ragozás means inflection, and ragozó can function as either an adjective meaning "inflecting" or a noun meaning "an inflector" or "an inflected form" depending on context. The concept is central to morphology, the study of how words form and change. A ragozó can be realized by suffixes, prefixes, internal vowel changes, or other phonological modifications attached to a word stem. In practice, linguists often refer to inflectional morphemes or the entire inflectional paradigm of a word class when discussing ragozó patterns. For verbs, ragozó forms mark different tenses, aspects, voices, persons, and numbers; for nouns and adjectives, they mark case and number, sometimes gender. The set of all inflected forms of a word or word class is called its paradigm. The term is used mainly in theoretical and descriptive grammars and may be replaced by more explicit terms like inflector, inflectional morpheme, or inflected form in other traditions. In computational linguistics, ragozó concepts underpin morphological analyzers and generators that produce correct word forms for given grammatical specifications.

See also: inflection, conjugation, declension, morphology, paradigm.