Question

Which of the following best defines inflection in grammar?

• A. A. Changing a word's core meaning or word class to form new words.
• B. B. Modifying a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense or number, without changing its core meaning or word class.
• C. C. Shortening a word by removing suffixes or prefixes.
• D. D. Combining two words to create a compound word.

Answer 1

Answer:

B. B. Modifying a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense or number, without changing its core meaning or word class.

Understanding Inflection in Grammar

• Definition of Inflection

  • Inflection is a morphological process where a word is modified to express different grammatical categories.
  • This modification typically involves adding affixes (usually suffixes in English) to the base form of a word.
  • Crucially, inflection does not change the word's core meaning or its word class (part of speech).

• Key Grammatical Categories Expressed by Inflection

  • Tense: For verbs, indicating when an action occurs (e.g., walk vs. walked vs. walking).
  • Number: For nouns, indicating singularity or plurality (e.g., cat vs. cats). For verbs, agreeing with the subject's number (e.g., he walks vs. they walk).
  • Person: For verbs, indicating who is performing the action (e.g., I walk, you walk, he walks).
  • Case: For nouns and pronouns, indicating their grammatical function in a sentence (e.g., subject, object, possessive). English has limited case inflection for nouns (possessive 's, e.g., boy's) but more for pronouns (e.g., I/me/my, he/him/his).
  • Degree: For adjectives and adverbs, indicating comparative or superlative forms (e.g., tall, taller, tallest).
  • Mood and Voice: For verbs (e.g., indicative, imperative, subjunctive moods; active, passive voices).

• Inflectional Morphemes

  • The affixes added during inflection are called inflectional morphemes. In English, these are always suffixes.
  • There are typically eight common inflectional suffixes in English:
    1. -s (3rd person singular present tense verb: walks)
    2. -ed (past tense verb: walked)
    3. -ing (present participle/gerund verb: walking)
    4. -en (past participle verb, though often irregular: eaten, broken)
    5. -s (plural noun: cats)
    6. -'s (possessive noun: cat's)
    7. -er (comparative adjective/adverb: taller)
    8. -est (superlative adjective/adverb: tallest)

• Distinction from Derivation

  • It is important to differentiate inflection from derivation.
  • Derivation involves adding affixes to create new words, often changing the word's meaning significantly or its word class (e.g., happy (adj) + -ness → happiness (noun); read (verb) + -er → reader (noun)).
  • Inflection merely adjusts a word for its grammatical role in a sentence without altering its fundamental identity.

• Inflection in English vs. Other Languages

  • English is considered an analytic language, meaning it relies more on word order and auxiliary verbs (e.g., will go, has gone) than on extensive inflectional endings.
  • In contrast, languages like Latin, German, Russian, and Sanskrit are highly synthetic (or inflected) languages, where words undergo significant changes in form to convey grammatical relationships (e.g., different endings for nouns based on their case, number, and gender).
  • Old English was much more inflected than Modern English, having a more complex case system for nouns.

• Irregular Inflection

  • While most inflections follow regular patterns (e.g., adding -s for plural), some words have irregular inflections.
  • Examples include irregular plurals (e.g., child → children, mouse → mice) and irregular past tense verbs (e.g., go → went, sing → sang).

• Paradigm

  • The complete set of all inflected forms for a given word is known as its paradigm (e.g., the paradigm of 'go' includes 'go', 'goes', 'went', 'gone', 'going').