nouninflected

Nouninflected refers to nouns that carry inflectional morphology to mark grammatical categories such as case, number, and gender, and sometimes definiteness or possession. The term highlights the contrast with nouns that are uninflected or invariable, which do not change form across syntactic contexts.

Inflectional systems differ across languages. Some languages have rich declensions with many endings, while others have a simpler or minimal system. Nouninflected forms are often organized into paradigms or declension classes, and the specific endings determine a noun’s syntactic role and its agreement with adjectives or determiners in a sentence.

Examples illustrate the variation. In English, nouns inflect for number (cat vs cats) and possessive form (cat's), but exhibit little other inflection. In German, nouns inflect for number and gender, and their case markings affect accompanying articles and adjectives (der Hund, des Hundes, dem Hund, die Hunde). In Russian, nouns change with several cases and two numbers, producing a wide range of inflected forms.

In computational linguistics, nouninflected forms are analyzed to assign morphosyntactic features such as Number, Case, and Gender. Tools like morphological analyzers and parsers model nouninflected forms to determine lemmas and grammatical roles, enabling tasks such as parsing, loCalization, and machine translation.

See also: inflection, declension, noun, grammatical gender, grammatical case, number agreement, morphology.