flexionales

Flexionales are the inflectional forms of a word, variants that encode grammatical information such as tense, number, person, gender, case, aspect, mood, or definiteness without changing the word’s basic lexical category. They form part of a word’s paradigm, representing how a lemma can appear in different syntactic contexts.

Inflectional morphology contrasts with derivational morphology, which creates new words or changes a word’s lexical category. Flexional forms serve to mark grammatical relationships and agreement within a sentence, helping to signal who did what to whom, when, and under what conditions. Not all languages rely equally on inflection; some have rich flexional systems, while others use little or none.

Examples illustrate the concept across languages. In English, verbs alter for tense and aspect (walk, walks, walked, walking) and nouns for number (cat, cats). In Spanish, verbs change for person and number (hablo, hablas, habla), while adjectives agree with nouns in gender and number (niño alto, niña alta). German shows noun and article inflection through case and number (der Hund, des Hundes, dem Hund, den Hund). Turkish uses extensive suffixation to indicate case and agreement in an agglutinative system. Finnish also employs a large set of inflectional endings to mark case, number, and definiteness.

In linguistic analysis and language description, flexionales are cataloged in inflectional paradigms and dictionaries, and they play a central role in syntax, agreement systems, and morphological theory. See also inflection, morphology, derivation, conjugation, and declension.