flexiunea

Flexiunea, or inflection, is the modification of a word to express grammatical categories such as tense, mood, aspect, number, person, gender, case, or voice. It is a central feature of many languages and allows speakers to encode grammatical relations within word forms, reducing dependence on strict word order. Inflection is distinct from derivation and compounding, which create new lexemes rather than altering existing ones.

Flexiunea can affect different parts of speech. Nouns, adjectives, and pronouns may change for case, number, and gender. Verbs typically change for person and number and for tense, aspect, mood, and voice. Some languages also mark degree of comparison or evidentiality through inflection. Mechanisms include affixation (suffixes or prefixes), vowel or consonant alternations, and suppletion, as well as irregular forms.

Examples illustrate the idea. In Latin, amō, amās, amat show first-person singular, second-person singular, and third-person singular present, while amāmus shows first-person plural. In Finnish, nouns take cases that indicate grammatical roles, and verbs inflect for person and number as well as mood and tense. In Romanian, nouns and adjectives agree in gender and number, and verbs are conjugated for person and number across tenses and moods.

Inflection supports syntax by marking relationships and roles, enabling flexible word order. It is common in synthetic languages (fusional or agglutinative) and less so in analytic languages, which rely more on word order and auxiliary words. The study of inflection covers morphology, historical change, and computational approaches to parsing and generation.

Etymology: from Latin flexio, "a bending."