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Linguistics & Grammar vocabulary · Morphology and Word Formation

Inflection

Meaning in linguistics & grammar, with examples

/ɪnˈflekʃn/nounCore term

In linguistics & grammar, inflection means: A change in the form of a word, usually by adding an ending, to show grammatical information such as tense, number, person or case, without making a new word.

In Turkish: çekim, çekim eki

How it is used

Contrasted with derivation. English has only eight inflectional endings (plural -s, possessive -'s, third-person -s, -ed, -en, -ing, -er and -est), while Turkish has many more. An older British spelling is inflexion.

Example sentences

  1. In 'walks', the -s is an inflection that marks third person singular present.

  2. Old English had far more inflection than modern English does.

Common collocations

  • inflectional ending
  • inflectional morphology
  • verb inflection
  • case inflection
  • derivationThe process of making a new word from an existing one, usually by adding an affix, as when teach becomes teacher or happy becomes unhappy.
  • suffixA letter or group of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning, its word class or its grammatical form, such as -ness, -ful or -ed.
  • morphologyThe study of the internal structure of words: how they are built from smaller meaningful parts such as roots, prefixes and suffixes.
  • tenseA grammatical category, shown by the form of the verb, that places an event in time relative to the moment of speaking, such as present or past.

More terms: Morphology and Word Formation

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