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For example, Mandarin Chinese has many compound words, [2] which gives it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, but since it has almost no inflectional affixes at all to convey grammatical relationships, it is a very analytic language. English is not totally analytic in its nouns since it uses inflections for number (e.g., "one day ...
Inflection of the Scottish Gaelic lexeme for 'dog', which is cù for singular, chù for dual with the number dà ('two'), and coin for plural. In linguistic morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation [1] in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, 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.
Recipes may come in written or spoken form. Written recipes are considered procedural discourse, which is agency neutral and time neutral. [12] “This agency/ time neutrality is reflected in the use of the imperative form”, which has no overt subject and no grammatical tense in English.
The field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining morphemes. Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional ...
English often needs two or three verbs to express the same meaning that Latin expresses with a single verb. Latin is a relatively synthetic language; it expresses grammatical meaning using inflection, whereas the verb system of English, a Germanic language, is relatively analytic; it uses auxiliary verbs to express functional meaning.
A typical English verb may have five different inflected forms: The base form or plain form (go, write, climb), which has several uses—as an infinitive, imperative, present subjunctive, and present indicative except in the third-person singular; The -s form (goes, writes, climbs), used as the present indicative in the third-person singular
In many languages, words appear in several inflected forms. For example, in English, the verb 'to walk' may appear as 'walk', 'walked', 'walks' or 'walking'. The base form, 'walk', that one might look up in a dictionary, is called the lemma for the word. The association of the base form with a part of speech is often called a lexeme of the word.