inflexief

Inflexief is a linguistic term used to describe a lexeme or form that does not participate in inflectional morphology. An inflexief item remains morphologically invariant across grammatical categories such as tense, number, case, person, gender, or mood. The term is more common in discussions of morphological typology and theoretical linguistics than in everyday grammar, and it can apply to a word class or an entire language depending on context.

In practice, languages often mix inflexive and inflected elements. Some analytic or isolating languages rely on word order and auxiliary particles rather than inflection to convey grammatical relations, while others may have certain parts of speech that are inflexief even as others inflect. It is also common for individual lexemes within a language to be inflexief while others are fully inflected, depending on historical development and syntactic requirements.

Examples are typically hypothetical or descriptive rather than prescriptive. In a hypothetical language X, one might describe a noun as inflexief if it bears no plural, case, or possessive markers and remains the same across contexts. A verb described as inflexief would not conjugate for tense, aspect, mood, or agreement, with grammatical meaning conveyed through particles or word order.

Criticism and alternatives: some linguists prefer terms like invariable or uninflected to avoid ambiguity, while others use inflexief to emphasize the absence of inflection rather than the presence of other grammatical devices.