Inflection

This article is about linguistics. For a mathematical meaning, see Stationary point.

An Inflection or inflexion is a change of word form according to grammatical function, which occurs in inflected languages.

Inflection is differentiated depending on the class:

• declension, in which a noun changes due to its grammatical function (number, case, or grammatical gender)
• conjugation, in which a verb changes according to number, person (subject or object), tense (time), or mood.

There are two basic types of inflection:

• weak: by the addition of affixes and
• strong: by changing the stem

Linguistically, the former is strictly called agglutination, and the latter is the true sense of the word inflection. However, in the popular imagination, agglutination is discarded and the umbrella term inflection used.

Words often do not appear in a fundamental form (the word root) except in dictionaries and grammars.

A schema of all inflections for a word is sometimes called a paradigm.

Various major languages, including English, German, Russian, Spanish, French, and Hindi - all Indo-European languages - are inflected to a greater or lesser extent.

Other languages use almost no inflection, Chinese and Vietnamese among them.

The most obvious inflections in English occur in strong verbs, e.g. I am, you are and to take, I took; and nouns, one man, all men; foot, feet. Weak inflections, however, are more common, such as I love, I loved, he loves; John, John's car.

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