infleksioon

Infleksioon, or inflection in linguistic terms, is a grammatical process in natural languages in which the form of a word changes to express grammatical categories such as case, number, and gender for nouns and adjectives, or tense, mood, voice, person, and aspect for verbs. In many languages inflection is essential for indicating relationships among sentence elements, allowing speakers to convey who performs an action, when it occurs, and how it relates to other words. Inflectional changes may be realized by affixes (suffixes, prefixes), internal stem changes, or a combination of both, and may involve irregular or suppletive forms.

Noun inflection often encodes case and number and sometimes gender; verb inflection encodes tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number. Adjectives may agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number, and case. Languages vary widely: analytic languages like English rely more on word order and auxiliary words; fusional languages such as Latin or Russian use several overlapping inflectional endings; agglutinative languages like Turkish or Finnish attach multiple affixes to express distinctions.

In linguistics, inflection is distinguished from derivation (which creates new words or meanings) and from compounding. Inflection underpins morphological paradigms—the full set of inflected forms for a lexeme. In computational linguistics, inflection is modeled for lemmatization, morphological analysis, parsing, and generation, using rules or statistical methods.

The term infleksioon derives from Latin inflectere, meaning to bend, and remains a central concept in grammar and language typology.