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Middle and Modern English lost progressively more of the Old English inflectional system. Modern English is considered a weakly inflected language, since its nouns have only vestiges of inflection (plurals, the pronouns), and its regular verbs have only four forms: an inflected form for the past indicative and subjunctive (looked), an inflected ...
Deflexion is a diachronic linguistic process in inflectional languages typified by the degeneration of the inflectional structure of a language. All members of the Indo-European language family are subject to some degree of deflexional change. This phenomenon has been especially strong in Western European languages, such as English, French, and ...
Different word orders preserving the original meaning are possible in an inflected language, [5] while modern English relies on word order for meaning, with a little flexibility. [1] This is one of the advantages of an inflected language. The English sentences above, when read without the made-up case suffixes, are confusing.
A regular English verb has only one principal part, from which all the forms of the verb can be derived.This is the base form or dictionary form.For example, from the base form exist, all the inflected forms of the verb (exist, exists, existed, existing) can be predictably derived.
-ing is a suffix used to make one of the inflected forms of English verbs. This verb form is used as a present participle , as a gerund , and sometimes as an independent noun or adjective . The suffix is also found in certain words like morning and ceiling , and in names such as Browning .
Irregular verbs in Modern English include many of the most common verbs: the dozen most frequently used English verbs are all irregular. New verbs (including loans from other languages, and nouns employed as verbs) usually follow the regular inflection, unless they are compound formations from an existing irregular verb (such as housesit , from ...
Verbs are then said to agree with their subjects (resp. objects). Many English verbs exhibit subject agreement of the following sort: whereas I go, you go, we go, they go are all grammatical in standard English, he go is not (except in the subjunctive, as "They requested that he go with them").
In English, for example, while plurals are usually formed by adding the suffix -s, certain words use nonconcatenative processes for their plural forms: foot /fʊt/ → feet /fiːt/; Many irregular verbs form their past tenses, past participles, or both in this manner: freeze /ˈfriːz/ → froze /ˈfroʊz/, frozen /ˈfroʊzən/.