Inflection (linguistics)

Illustrated examples of substantive bending. The color of the cat symbolizes the sex of the feline, except the black that indicates the root, being the rose for the feminine and blue for the masculine genus.

The inflection is the alteration that words undergo through constituent morphemes according to the grammatical or categorical meaning to express their different functions within the sentence and their relationships of dependency or agreement with other words or elements sentences.

In traditional grammar, inflection is often given different names as it applies to different kinds of words:

• La verbal bending usually called conjugation.
• La nominal bending It is usually called declination, and in the indo-European languages it is normally applied to nouns, pronouns and adjectives.

When morphemes are added directly to the root, radical inflection occurs and when they are added to the stem, thematic inflection occurs. Any phonological segment added to indicate a particular inflectional accident is called a ending.

Bending and drifting

Inflection differs from derivation in that in the latter case the morphemes do not add a simply grammatical value, but rather the affixes or derivative suffixes, involve referential and not purely grammatical semantic changes.

The semantic-grammatical difference between inflection and derivation entails an almost universal restriction on the order of inflectional and derivative morphemes: derivative affixes are closer to the stem than inflectional morphemes when both are present.

Nominal bending

In inflectional languages, the noun is composed of a lexeme or root and possibly other constituent or grammatical morphemes of gender, number, or grammatical case. Thus a name has one form or another in terms of its gender, number, and sometimes case. The set of forms of a root between which there are no semantic differences but only grammatical ones, all these variants form the so-called declension.

On the other hand, the name can also receive derivative morphemes or free or clitic morphemes like the article, without lexical meaning. These other morphemes are not considered part of the inflection.

In the examples on the right you can see how the stem gat- acquires more specific meanings with the inflectional morphemes -o (masculine), -a (feminine), -s (plural) and -Ø (singular: the absence of morphemes is also significant).

Verbal inflection

The verb is composed of a lexeme and constituent or grammatical morphemes called endings that indicate tense, mood, aspect, voice, number, and person. These variations constitute the so-called conjugation. You can also receive derivative morphemes afíjales or affixes.

Invariable words

The term «invariable word» refers to any chain of morphemes that does not admit inflection of the previous types and therefore does not present variation due to inflection, being its form invariable.

In Spanish, which is an inflectional language, only prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs (with a few exceptions, such as lej-ísimos), interjections and little else are invariable words. In Chinese, for example, which is an isolating language, the class of invariable words is broader.