Languages that are so inflected that a sentence can consist of a single highly inflected word (such as many Native American languages) are called polysynthetic languages.
These can be highly inflected (such as Latin, Greek, Biblical Hebrew, and Sanskrit), or slightly inflected (such as English, Dutch, Persian). Languages that have some degree of inflection are synthetic languages. The sentence "the man jump" is not grammatically correct in English. For example, in "the man jumps", "man" is a singular noun, so "jump" is constrained in the present tense to use the third person singular suffix "s". Requiring the forms or inflections of more than one word in a sentence to be compatible with each other according to the rules of the language is known as concord or agreement. Analytic languages that do not make use of derivational morphemes, such as Standard Chinese, are said to be isolating. Languages that seldom make use of inflection, such as English, are said to be analytic. Its categories can be determined only from its context. Words that are never subject to inflection are said to be invariant for example, the English verb must is an invariant item: it never takes a suffix or changes form to signify a different grammatical category. These two morphemes together form the inflected word cars. For example, the English word cars is a noun that is inflected for number, specifically to express the plural the content morpheme car is unbound because it could stand alone as a word, while the suffix -s is bound because it cannot stand alone as a word.
Inflectional endings free#
The inflected form of a word often contains both one or more free morphemes (a unit of meaning which can stand by itself as a word), and one or more bound morphemes (a unit of meaning which cannot stand alone as a word).
In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word lead is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense it is simply the bare form of a verb. For example, the Latin verb ducam, meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix -am, expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense-mood (future indicative or present subjunctive). The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.Īn inflection expresses grammatical categories with affixation (such as prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, and transfix), apophony (as Indo-European ablaut), or other modifications. In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. Inflection of the Scottish Gaelic lexeme for "dog", which is cù for singular, chù for dual with the number dà ("two"), and coin for plural
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