noninflecting

Noninflecting is an adjective used in linguistics to describe forms, morphemes, or languages that do not show inflection for grammatical categories such as case, number, person, tense, mood, aspect, or gender. A noninflecting form remains invariant across syntactic contexts, or nearly so, and any grammatical relations are expressed by separate words (particles, auxiliaries) or by word order rather than by affixes.

In linguistic analysis, noninflecting often describes words or languages that rely on analytic or isolating mechanisms rather than productive inflection. Analytic languages use little morphology to mark agreement or grammatical function; instead, they use word order, function words, and particles to convey meaning. Mandarin Chinese, Indonesian, and Vietnamese are commonly cited as highly noninflecting, with nouns, verbs, and adjectives typically maintaining the same form across contexts and grammatical relations being signaled by particles or syntactic structure.

Within more inflecting languages, some elements can be noninflecting. For example, in Turkish, nouns inflect for case and number while adjectives generally do not inflect for these categories, making adjectives effectively noninflecting relative to nouns. In English, the base form of many verbs and adjectives is noninflecting in ordinary usage (e.g., the verb base form does not carry person-number inflection except in the third-person singular, and many adjectives do not show agreement in gender or number).

Notes of caution: noninflecting does not imply the absence of grammar. It is a descriptive term indicating that inflectional marking is limited or absent for certain items, with meaning often conveyed through syntax, function words, or context.