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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 ...
A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word such as independently, the morphemes are said to be in-, de-, pend, -ent, and -ly; pend is the (bound) root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes. [d] In words such as dogs, dog is the root and the -s is an inflectional
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.
The root morpheme is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced to smaller constituents. [3] The derivational morphemes carry only derivational information. [4] The affix is composed of all inflectional morphemes, and carries only inflectional information. [5]
For example, the Russian word vídyat/видят "they see" has a morpheme per word ratio of 2:1 since it has two morphemes. The root vid-/вид- conveys the imperfective aspect meaning, and the inflectional morpheme -yat/-ят inflects for four units of meaning (third-person subject, plural subject, present/future tense, indicative mood).
A morphological pattern usually references a prototypical class of inflectional forms, e.g. ring as per sing. In contrast, the paradigm of a lexeme is the explicit list of the inflected forms of the given lexeme (e.g. to ring , rang , rung ).
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 ...