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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.
An example of a Russian case inflection is given below (with explicit stress marks), using the singular forms of the Russian term for "sailor", which belongs to Russian's first declension class. моря́к ( nominative ) "[the] sailor" [as a subject] (e.g. Там стоит моряк : The sailor is standing there)
These contrived examples are relatively simple, whereas actual inflected languages have a far more complicated set of declensions, where the suffixes (or prefixes or infixes) change depending on the gender of the noun, the quantity of the noun, and other possible factors. This complexity and the possible lengthening of words is one of the ...
For example, unhappy and happiness derive from the root word happy. It is differentiated from inflection , which is the modification of a word to form different grammatical categories without changing its core meaning: determines , determining , and determined are from the root determine .
In linguistics, conjugation (/ ˌ k ɒ n dʒ ʊ ˈ ɡ eɪ ʃ ən / [1] [2]) is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar).
The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule, and compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word formation. Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme).
Grammatical number is a morphological category characterized by the expression of quantity through inflection or agreement. As an example, consider the English sentences below: That apple on the table is fresh. Those two apples on the table are fresh.
For Turkish, where the interrogative particle may be considered a part of the verbal inflection system, see the previous section. Another way of forming yes–no questions is the A-not-A construction, found for example in Chinese, [2] which offers explicit yes or no alternatives: 他是中国人 Tā shì Zhōngguórén. ("He is Chinese.")