flexionais

Flexionais are the inflectional component of morphology in linguistics. They comprise the inflected forms or affixes that mark grammatical information on a word, such as tense, number, gender, case, person, mood, aspect, or voice. Flexional changes may be realized as prefixes, suffixes, infixes, or internal vowel alternations. They modify the form of a word without creating a new lexical item, and they occur within inflectional paradigms that accompany a lemma. They are distinct from derivational morphology, which creates new words or shifts word class.

Languages vary in their reliance on flexionais. English has limited inflection (for example, -s for third-person singular and for plural nouns, -ed for past tense, -ing for participles). Spanish marks gender and number on adjectives (-o/-a, -os/-as) and uses endings on verbs to indicate tense and mood (-o, -as, -a, -amos, -áis, -an). German, Russian, Latin and other highly inflected languages use extensive noun endings to signal case, number, and gender. Some languages use vowel changes within the root (ablaut) as a morphophonological type of flexion.

In linguistic typology, flexionais are contrasted with derivational morphemes and with syntax. They form inflectional paradigms and can be more or less fusional (where a single affix marks multiple categories) or agglutinative (where each category has its own affix). The study of flexionais helps explain how grammar is encoded in different languages, and how inflected forms relate to word order and meaning.