Inflection
An inflection expresses grammatical categories with affixation (such as prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, and transfix), apophony (as Indo-European ablaut), or other modifications.
[3] 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).
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.
In dependent-marking languages, nouns in adpositional (prepositional or postpositional) phrases can carry inflectional morphemes.
In general, older Indo-European languages such as Latin, Ancient Greek, Old English, Old Norse, Old Church Slavonic and Sanskrit are extensively inflected because of their temporal proximity to Proto-Indo-European.
Old English was a moderately inflected language, using an extensive case system similar to that of modern Icelandic, Faroese or German.
The Romance languages, such as Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and especially – with its many cases – Romanian, have more overt inflection than English, especially in verb conjugation.
Adjectives, nouns and articles are considerably less inflected than verbs, but they still have different forms according to number and grammatical gender.
Adjectives, pronouns, and numerals are declined for number, gender, and case to agree with the noun they modify or for which they substitute.
All Slavic languages make use of a high degree of inflection, typically having six or seven cases and three genders for nouns and adjectives.
Declensional endings depend on case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, instrumental, vocative), number (singular, dual or plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and animacy (animate vs inanimate).
For example, in Jordanian Arabic, the second- and third-person feminine plurals (أنتنّ antunna and هنّ hunna) and their respective unique conjugations are lost and replaced by the masculine (أنتم antum and هم hum), whereas in Lebanese and Syrian Arabic, هم hum is replaced by هنّ hunna.
In addition, the system known as ʾIʿrāb places vowel suffixes on each verb, noun, adjective, and adverb, according to its function within a sentence and its relation to surrounding words.
Almost all words are inflected according to their roles in the sentence: verbs, nouns, pronouns, numerals, adjectives, and some particles.
The Estonian illative case, for example, is expressed by a modified root: maja → majja (historical form *maja-han).
Almost all words are inflected according to their roles in the sentence: verbs, nouns, pronouns, numerals, adjectives, and some particles.
Noun phrase morphology is agglutinative and consists of suffixes which simply attach to the end of a stem.
This is called the absolutive case and in Basque, as in most ergative languages, it is realized with a zero morph; in other words, it receives no special inflection.
Plurality is not marked on the noun and is identified only in the article or other determiner, possibly fused with a case marker.
The Singular and Plural categories are fused with the article, and these endings are used when the noun phrase is not closed by any other determiner.
This gives a potential 88 different forms, but the Indefinite and Proper Noun categories are identical in all but the local cases (inessive, allative, ablative, local-genitive), and many other variations in the endings can be accounted for by phonological rules operating to avoid impermissible consonant clusters.
A couple of examples will have to suffice to demonstrate the complexity of the Basque verb:[20] Liburu-akBook-PL.thesalduselldizkiegu.AUX.3PL/ABS.3PL/DAT.1PL/ERGLiburu-ak saldu dizkiegu.Book-PL.the sell AUX.3PL/ABS.3PL/DAT.1PL/ERG"We sold the books to them.
)The morphs that represent the various tense/person/case/mood categories of Basque verbs, especially in the auxiliaries, are so highly fused that segmenting them into individual meaningful units is nearly impossible, if not pointless.
Considering the multitude of forms that a particular Basque verb can take, it seems unlikely that an individual speaker would have an opportunity to utter them all in his or her lifetime.
While some languages indicate grammatical relations with inflectional morphemes, Chinese utilizes word order and particles.
However, these overt case forms are no longer used; most of the alternative pronouns are considered archaic in modern Mandarin Chinese.
[citation needed] Japanese shows a high degree of overt inflection of verbs, less so of adjectives, and very little of nouns, but it is mostly strictly agglutinative and extremely regular.
In Esperanto, an agglutinative language, nouns and adjectives are inflected for case (nominative, accusative) and number (singular, plural), according to a simple paradigm without irregularities.
Nouns are marked for number (singular and plural), and the accusative case may be shown in certain situations, typically when the direct object of a sentence precedes its verb.
The definite article "la" ("the") remains unaltered regardless of gender or case, and also of number, except when there is no other word to show plurality.
