inflections

Inflection is the modification of a word to express grammatical features such as tense, aspect, mood, voice, number, person, gender, and case. It occurs in many languages and is typically realized through changes to the word’s form, by affixes, internal vowel changes, or reduplication.

Inflectional changes are grammatical and do not create new lexical items; they form part of an inflectional paradigm, a set of related forms used to encode sentence structure. Some languages are highly inflectional; others are analytic and rely more on word order and auxiliary words. Inflection interacts with other morphological processes such as derivation, which creates new lexical items, while inflection remains focused on grammatical variation within a word.

Examples illustrate the range of inflection. English verbs show tense and agreement: walk, walks, walked. English nouns mark number: cat, cats. Spanish verbs display person and number: hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan. German nouns show case: der Mann (nominative), den Mann (accusative), des Mannes (genitive), dem Mann (dative). Turkish uses extensive suffixing: ev (house) → evler (houses), with additional possessive and case suffixes forming phrases like evimde (in my house).

Typologically, languages vary in how they realize inflection. Some are fusional, packing several grammatical meanings into one affix; others are agglutinative, adding ordered suffixes; others are analytic, relying mainly on word order and auxiliary words. Inflection remains a central concept in linguistics and affects fields such as language description, language teaching, and natural language processing, where recognition and generation of inflected forms are essential.