inflectible

Inflectible is an adjective used in linguistics to describe a word or lexeme that can undergo inflection, a change in form to express grammatical features such as case, number, gender, tense, mood, person, or aspect. The term derives from Latin inflectere “to bend,” with the English suffix -ible meaning capable of being. In many languages, different word classes—nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs—are inflectible to form paradigms that encode grammatical relationships within sentences.

English uses a limited set of inflectional forms for nouns and verbs, making it less inflectible than highly synthetic languages. For example, the noun cat is inflectible for number (cat vs. cats) and possession (cat’s), while the verb to walk inflects for tense and agreement (walk, walks, walked, walking). In contrast, languages such as Latin, Russian, or Turkish have extensive inflectional systems that produce large paradigms of word forms to indicate case, number, gender, tense, aspect, and mood.

Some languages and analyses describe words as either inflectible or non-inflectible, though in practice many languages exhibit a spectrum of inflectional productivity. Analytic languages, like Mandarin Chinese or Indonesian, rely more on word order and particles and have fewer inflectional changes, while highly inflecting languages rely on affixes and internal vowel or consonant changes.

Inflectible is contrasted with non-inflectible or non-inflecting forms, where grammatical relationships are expressed through other means rather than altering the form of the word. The concept is a core topic in morphological typology and the study of how languages encode syntactic information.