inflectable

Inflectable is an adjective used in linguistics to describe a word form that can undergo inflection, i.e., it can take inflectional morphemes to express grammatical categories such as tense, number, case, gender, mood, aspect, person, or voice. Whether a form is inflectable depends on the morphology of a language; some languages have extensive inflectional systems, while others are largely analytic and rely on word order or auxiliary words rather than inflection.

Inflection involves attaching affixes or making internal changes to a stem to create new word forms. For example, in English, nouns are inflectable for number: cat becomes cats; verbs are inflectable for tense and agreement: walk, walks, walked; adjectives may be inflectable for degree: big, bigger, biggest. In languages with richer morphology, such as Latin or Finnish, nouns, adjectives, and verbs can have numerous inflected forms that encode case, number, gender, person, and mood, among other features.

Inflectable forms are often organized into paradigms or inflectional tables, with a lemma serving as the base form from which other forms are derived. The term contrasts with invariable or non-inflecting words, which do not take additional morphemes to express grammatical relations.

In computing and language processing, inflectable forms are targets for lemmatization, stemming, and morphological generation, enabling programs to recognize or produce all variants of a word. The concept highlights how much a language relies on morphology to convey grammatical meaning. The word inflectable itself derives from Latin inflectare, meaning to bend, with the English suffix -able.