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Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes that modify a verb's tense, mood, aspect, voice, person, or number or a noun's case, gender, or number, rarely affecting the word's meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited.
Inflectional morphemes modify the tense, aspect, mood, person, or number of a verb or the number, grammatical gender, or case of a noun, adjective, or pronoun without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech). Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to ...
It is important to distinguish the paradigm of a lexeme from a morphological pattern. In the context of an inflecting language, an inflectional morphological pattern is not the explicit list of inflected forms. A morphological pattern usually references a prototypical class of inflectional forms, e.g. ring as per sing.
For example, the derivation of the word uncommon from common + un-(a derivational morpheme) does not change its part of speech (both are adjectives). An important distinction between derivational and inflectional morphology lies in the content/function of a listeme [clarification needed]. Derivational morphology changes both the meaning and the ...
For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching. Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech, and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number, tense, and aspect.
A synthetic language is a language that is statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio. Rule-wise, a synthetic language is characterized by denoting syntactic relationships between words via inflection or agglutination, with fusional languages favoring the former and agglutinative languages the latter subtype of word synthesis.
In a general non-theoretical sense polysynthetic languages are those languages that have a high degree of morphological synthesis, and which tend to form long complex words containing long strings of morphemes, including derivational and inflectional morphemes. A language then is "synthetic" or "synthesizing" if it tends to have more than one ...
Affixes are bound by definition. [5] English language affixes are almost exclusively prefixes or suffixes: pre-in "precaution" and -ment in "shipment". Affixes may be inflectional, indicating how a certain word relates to other words in a larger phrase, or derivational, changing either the part of speech or the actual meaning of a word.