inflect

Inflect is a verb that means to modify a word to express grammatical information such as tense, number, case, gender, mood, person, or aspect. The change is achieved by inflectional morphemes, which may be affixes or, in some languages, internal vowel or consonant changes. The process applies to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs, and is studied in inflectional morphology. Inflection is distinguished from derivation, which forms new words with related but distinct meanings or grammatical categories.

Languages vary widely in how much they rely on inflection. Some are highly inflected, using many endings to indicate grammatical relations, while others are analytic and depend more on word order and helper words. Inflection often occurs in paradigms or tables of related word forms, known as inflectional paradigms.

Examples illustrate the range of inflection. In English, pronouns inflect for case (I/me, he/him, we/us) and verbs inflect for tense and agreement (walk/walks/walked/walking). Nouns may take plural endings (cat/cats), and adjectives can show degree (big/bigger/biggest). In more inflected languages, such as German or Latin, nouns show case and gender and verbs show person, number, tense, mood, and voice, with numerous endings.

In computational linguistics, inflection is a key area of analysis and generation, enabling systems to recognize or produce the correct word form in different grammatical contexts. Handling inflection is essential for accurate parsing, morphological tagging, and natural language generation.