inflectors
An inflector is a linguistic element that marks grammatical information on a word, producing an inflected form. Inflectional morphemes—such as affixes, internal changes, or clitics—do not typically create new lexical meanings but adjust grammatical category like tense, number, case, mood, or gender. Inflectors can be prefixes, suffixes, infixes, or even separate words in some languages.
Inflectional systems vary across languages. In many Indo-European languages, endings attached to nouns and verbs encode
Inflectors are typically contrasted with derivational morphemes, which create new lexical items or shift a word's
In linguistic analysis, inflectors underlie agreement and syntactic marking, enabling distinctions such as singular versus plural,