inflectionaalinen

Inflectionaalinen is a linguistic term that translates roughly to “inflectional.” In morphology, it describes processes and forms by which a word changes shape to express grammatical information, such as number, case, tense, mood, person, or gender, without altering the core lexical meaning. It is often contrasted with derivational morphology, where forms create new words or shift the word’s category or meaning.

Inflectional systems vary widely across languages. In fusional languages, a single affix may encode multiple features (for example, person and number in a verb form). In agglutinative languages, distinct affixes attach to a base to mark each feature separately. Some languages are highly inflectional with extensive case and verb-conjugation paradigms, while others are less inflectional and rely more on word order and auxiliary words to convey grammatical information.

Typical domains of inflection include nouns with case and number, adjectives with degree or agreement, and verbs with tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number. Examples in English illustrate inflectional endings such as the plural -s in dogs or the past tense -ed in walked, while more morphologically rich languages like Finnish or Latin show extensive paradigms where many forms can be generated from a single lemma.

Inflectionaalinen, as a concept, underpins much of traditional grammar, language teaching, and computational linguistics. It informs how dictionaries, parsers, and morphological analyzers segment and classify word forms, and how grammars describe the variation within a language’s word-formation system.