What is inflection?

Inflection is variation in the form of a word, typically by means of an affix, that expresses a grammatical contrast which is obligatory for the stem’s word class in some given grammatical context.

In contrast to derivation, inflection

• does not result in a change of word class, and
• usually produces a predictable, nonidiosyncratic change of meaning.

Inflectional operations ground the semantic content of a root according to place, time, and participant reference, without substantially affecting the basic semantic content of the root. They often specify when an event or situation took place, who or what were the participants, and sometimes where, how or whether an event or situation really took place. In other words, roots can be inflected for such things as:

Inflectional operations

• are grammatically required in certain syntactic environments

  Example: The main verb of an English sentence must be inflected for subject and tense.

• tend to be regular and productive, in comparison to derivational operations, and
• tend to occur in paradigms .

• In the following English sentence, come is inflected for person and number by the suffix -s:

  The mailman comes about noon.

• In the following Spanish noun phrase, las and rojas are inflected for agreement with manzanas in grammatical gender by -a and in number by -s:

• What is a morphosyntactic operation?

• What is an inflectional affix?
• Comparison of inflection and derivation

Crystal 1985 157

Payne, T. 1997a 26, 233, 234

Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik 1985 1548

Mish 1991 620

Richards, Platt, and Weber 1985 139

Hartmann and Stork 1972 112

Bybee 1985 2, 99

Context for this page:

• Concept module: inflection
• In overview module: Glossary (Linguistics): I
• In modular book: Glossary of linguistic terms, by Eugene E. Loos (general editor), Susan Anderson (editor), Dwight H., Day, Jr. (editor), Paul C. Jordan (editor), and J. Douglas Wingate (editor)
• In bookshelf: Linguistics

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 5 January 2004

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