LinguisticsLesson 3 of 5 in the course Morphology

Inflection: Grammatical Forms, Morphological Patterns, and Language Change

5 flashcards · 5 quiz questions · 5 match pairs · 5 fill-in sentences · English

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Summary

Inflection modifies a word to express grammatical information while generally preserving its basic meaning and word class. This lesson introduces the central idea and shows how grammatical categories are expressed in words and sentences.

Inflection is a process of word formation in which a word changes form to express grammatical categories. Depending on the language and word, these categories can include tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness.

All flashcards

What is inflection?
A change to a word's form that expresses grammatical information, such as number or tense, while usually keeping the word's basic meaning and word class.
What is a bound morpheme?
A meaningful word part that cannot stand alone as a word. In *cars*, *-s* is a bound morpheme marking plural number.
What is an invariant word?
A word that does not change its form to express grammatical categories. English *must* is invariant.
What is grammatical agreement?
A relationship in which the forms of related words must be compatible according to a language's rules, as in singular *man* with *jumps*.
How do conjugation and declension differ?
Conjugation is the inflection of verbs. Declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and certain other word classes.

Quiz questions

  1. What distinguishes derivation from inflection?Answer: Derivation forms a new lexeme or changes meaning or word class.
  2. What does reduplication involve in morphology?Answer: Repeating a whole word or part of a word.
  3. What is characteristic of a fusional morphological pattern?Answer: One inflectional form may express several grammatical categories.
  4. What does deflexion mean?Answer: The historical loss or reduction of inflectional distinctions.
  5. What is typical of an isolating language?Answer: It has little or no bound morphology and relies more on other strategies.

Based on the Wikipedia article Inflection, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Adapted into a summary, flashcards and quizzes.

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