inflected

Inflected is an adjective used in linguistics to describe a word form that has been altered to express grammatical information such as tense, mood, voice, number, person, gender, or case. Inflection involves modifying a stem or base form by adding affixes, changing internal vowels, or applying other systematic changes. A word and its inflected forms together constitute an inflectional paradigm.

In linguistic analysis, inflection vs derivation are distinguished: inflection signals grammatical relationships without creating a new lexical item, whereas derivation forms may produce new words and can change the word class. Examples illustrate different inflectional patterns. English inflects verbs for tense and aspect (walk, walks, walked, walking) and pronouns for case and number (I, me; he, him). Spanish verbs conjugate for person and tense (hablo, hablas, habla). Latin nouns change form for case (rosa, rosae, rosam). Some languages rely heavily on inflection, such as Russian, Finnish, and Turkish, which have extensive case systems or agreement markers. Other languages are more analytic, using word order and auxiliary words rather than extensive inflection.

Inflected forms are central to studies of morphology and syntax. In computational linguistics, recognizing inflected forms is crucial for lemmatization, parsing, and language generation. The adjective inflected itself can be used in past participle form to describe words that have undergone inflection, or to indicate inflectional state in a given context.