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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.
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 ...
A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. [1] Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes.
For example, the Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the first-person singular preterite tense form comí ("I ate"); the single suffix-í represents both the features of first-person singular agreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature. Another illustration of fusionality is the Latin word bonus ("good").
Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes or morphemes per word, and to be very regular, in particular with very few irregular verbs – for example, Japanese has only two considered fully irregular, and only about a dozen others with only minor irregularity; Luganda has only one (or two, depending on how "irregular" is ...
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.
Therefore, morphology in synthetic languages is more important than syntax. Most Indo-European languages are moderately synthetic. There are two subtypes of synthesis, according to whether morphemes are clearly differentiable or not. These subtypes are agglutinative and fusional (or inflectional or flectional in older terminology).
In contrast, "handshakes" is a single word consisting of three morphemes (hand, shake, -s). This word has a 3:1 morpheme per word ratio. On average, words in English have a morpheme per word ratio substantially greater than one. It is perfectly possible for a language to have one inflectional morpheme yet more than one unit of meaning.