inflects

Inflection is the process by which words change form to encode grammatical information. The resulting forms are inflected forms, and the act of producing them is called inflecting. In many languages, inflects (the inflected forms) reflect categories such as number, person, tense, aspect, mood, case, gender, and degree of comparison.

Inflection is typically realized through morphological changes. Common mechanisms include affixation (for example, adding a suffix to mark plural in English: cat to cats, or the past tense: walk to walked), internal stem changes (man to men), and irregular forms that do not follow predictable rules (went as the past tense of go). Some languages rely heavily on inflection, producing many distinct forms for a single lexeme, while others are more analytic, using separate words or word order rather than inflection to convey grammatical meaning.

Inflected forms help determine syntactic relations and grammatical roles without relying solely on word order. Nouns may inflect for number and case in some languages; verbs inflect for tense, aspect, mood, person, and number; adjectives may inflect for degree or agreement. Irregular inflections and suppletion also occur, contributing to the diversity of inflectional systems.

Inflection is distinct from derivation, which creates new words or changes part of speech (for example, happy becoming happiness). Some languages use clitics or particles to signal grammatical information instead of or in addition to inflection. Inflectional patterns are a core area of morphology and vary widely across language families. See also: morphology, paradigm, agreement.