infleksi

Infleksi, or inflection, is a morphologic process by which the form of a word changes to reflect grammatical information. Inflection typically does not create a new word class; instead it yields alternate forms within a word's grammatical paradigm, marking categories such as number (singular, plural), person, tense, aspect, mood, case, gender, and voice. The study of inflection is a central part of morphology and is distinguished from derivation, which creates new words or changes word class.

Inflection is realized through inflectional morphemes. These are usually affixes (suffixes, prefixes, infixes), but may involve vowel or consonant alternations (ablaut) and even internal stem changes. Languages differ in how they encode inflection: fusional languages merge several grammatical categories into single affixes; agglutinative languages attach a string of discrete morphemes; isolating languages use little to no inflection. Examples: Turkish uses comprehensive suffixation for case, number, and person; Finnish has a large case system; German has strong and weak verb paradigms; English has relatively limited inflection, especially in nouns and verbs.

Inflection plays a key role in morphology descriptions, syntax, language acquisition, and natural language processing. An inflectional paradigm lists all the forms a word can take, enabling predictions of form in different grammatical contexts. Irregular inflection shows that not all forms follow regular rules. In many languages inflection interacts with other morphological processes like derivation and compounding.