inflektioyhdistelmä

Inflectional combination, or "inflektioyhdistelmä" in Finnish linguistics, refers to the phenomenon where a word undergoes multiple inflectional changes to express various grammatical categories. This occurs in languages that have rich inflectional systems, such as Finnish, where a single word form can convey information about case, number, possession, and tense simultaneously.

For example, in Finnish, the word "talo" (house) can be inflected extensively. "Talossani" means "in my house" (locative case, singular possessive suffix). Further inflection could yield "taloissani" (in my houses - locative case, plural, singular possessive suffix), demonstrating the combined effect of multiple inflectional morphemes. The order and type of these suffixes are crucial for determining the word's precise meaning and grammatical function within a sentence.

This concept is distinct from derivation, which changes a word's part of speech or core meaning. Inflectional combination focuses solely on the accumulation of grammatical markers onto a base word. Understanding inflectional combinations is essential for analyzing the morphology of highly inflected languages and for developing accurate natural language processing tools for them. The complexity of these combinations can make parsing and understanding challenging for learners and computational systems alike.