terminaisons

Terminaisons, or endings, are inflectional morphemes attached to the end of a word to signal grammatical information such as tense, person, number, mood, case, gender, or aspect. They are a central feature of morphology and are especially prominent in languages with rich inflectional systems.

Endings occur across parts of speech, but they are most visible with verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Verb endings indicate who performs an action and when, while noun and adjective endings show how a noun relates to other elements in a sentence, including number, gender, and case. In some languages these endings are tightly integrated into the word’s stem and can produce complex paradigm patterns.

Examples illustrate the variety of endings. In French, the present tense of parler uses endings such as -e, -es, -e, -ons, -ez, -ent (je parle, tu parles, il parle, nous parlons, vous parlez, ils parlent). In Spanish, -o, -as, -a, -amos, -áis, -an mark different subject pronouns for -ar verbs (hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan). In Latin, noun endings convey case and number (for instance, -us, -a, -um in various forms) and show gender agreement with adjectives and pronouns.

Languages vary in their reliance on endings. English, for example, uses relatively few inflectional endings and relies more on word order and auxiliary words, whereas languages such as Latin, Russian, or Arabic exhibit extensive nominal or verbal endings. Endings can be regular or irregular, and they interact with phonology, root semantics, and historical sound changes.

In linguistics, the study of termin ions falls under morphology and inflection theory, with applications in language teaching, historical linguistics, and natural language processing.