
:''This article is about inflection in linguistics. For a mathematical meaning, see Stationary point.'' Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marker (linguistics) of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i.e. relational) information, such as grammatical gender, grammatical tense, grammatical person, etc. ==Declension and conjugation== Those who study grammar may be familiar with two traditional grammatical terms that refer to inflectional paradigms of specific word classes: * Declension: noun inflectional paradigm (often includes pronouns, adjectives, and demonstratives as well) (often involving grammatical number, noun case, or grammatical gender). * grammatical conjugation: verb inflectional paradigm (often involving grammatical number, grammatical person, tense, or grammatical mood). Below is an example of a noun declension of the Latin noun ''vir'' 'man'. It is inflected for case and number with suffixes. {| border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="4" |- | | ''Singular'' | ''Plural'' |- | ''Nom.'' | vir | vir-ī |- | ''Gen.'' | vir-ī | vir-ōrum |- | ''Dat.'' | vir-ō | vir-īs |- | ''Acc.'' | vir-um | vir-ōs |- | ''Abl.'' | vir-ō | vir-īs |} Below is a conjugation of the verb ''hi'' 'arrive' in Lakota language. It is inflected for person with prefixes and for number with the suffix ''-pi''. {| border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="4" |- | | colspan="2" align="center"| ''Singular (/dual)'' | colspan="2" align="center"| ''Plural'' |- | ''1st'' | align="right" | wa-hi | 'I arrive' | colspan="2" align="center" | - |- | ''Inclusive (dual)'' |align="right"| ų-hi | 'you & I arrive' |align="right"| ų-hi-pi | 'we arrive' |- | ''2nd'' |align="right"| ya-hi | 'you arrive' |align="right"| ya-hi-pi | 'you all arrive' |- | ''3rd'' |align="right"| hi | 'he arrives' |align="right"| hi-pi | 'they arrive' |} However, these two terms seem to be biased toward well-known dependent-marking languages (such as Spanish, Latin, German, Russian, Japanese etc.). In dependent-marking languages, nouns in adposition can carry inflectional morphemes. (Adpositions include prepositions and postpositions.) In head-marking languages, the adpositions can carry the inflection in adpositional phrases. This means that these languages will have inflectional paradigms involving adpositions. In Western Apache (San Carlos, Arizona dialect), the postposition ''-ká’'' 'on' is inflected for person and number with prefixes. {| BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="2" CELLPADDING="4" |- | |COLSPAN=2 align="center"| ''Singular'' |COLSPAN=2 align="center"| ''Dual'' |COLSPAN=2 align="center"| ''Plural'' |- | ''1st'' |align="right"| shi-ká’ | 'on me' |align="right"| noh-ká’ | 'on us two' |align="right"| da-noh-ká’ | 'on us' |- | ''2nd'' |align="right"| ni-ká’ | 'on you' |align="right"| nohwi-ká’ | 'on you two' |align="right"| da-nohwi-ká’ | 'on you all' |- | ''3rd'' |align="right"| bi-ká’ | 'on him' |COLSPAN=2 align="center"| - |align="right"| da-bi-ká’ | 'on them' |} Traditional grammars have specific terms for noun and verb paradigms but not for adpositional paradigms. ==Inflection vs. derivation== Inflection is the process of adding ''inflectional morphemes'' (atomic meaning units) to a word, which may indicate grammatical information (i.e., case, number, person, grammatical gender/word class, mood, mode, tense, aspect, other relational info). Compare with derivation (linguistics), which create a new word from an existing word, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (e.g., changing a noun to a verb). Words generally do not appear in dictionaries with inflectional morphemes. But they often do appear with derivational morphemes. For instance, English dictionaries list ''readable'' and ''readability'', words with derivational suffixes, along with their root ''read''. However, no English dictionary will list ''book'' as one entry and ''books'' as a separate entry nor will they list ''jump'' and ''jumped'' as two different entries. In some languages, inflected words do not appear in a fundamental form (the Root morpheme) except in dictionaries and grammars. ==Inflectional morphology== Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called ''inflectional languages''. Morphemes may be added in several different ways: *affix, or simply adding morphemes onto the word without changing the root, *reduplication, doubling all or part of a word to change its meaning, *alternation (linguistics), exchanging one sound for another in the root (usually vowel sounds, as in the Ablaut process found in Germanic Strong verbs and the Umlaut often found in nouns, among others). *lexical stress, pitch accent and tonal language, where no sounds are added or changed but the intonation and relative strength of each sound is altered regularly. A schema of all inflections for a word is sometimes called a paradigm. Affixing includes prefixing (adding before the base), and suffixing (adding after the base), as well as the much less common infixing (inside) and circumfixing (a combination of prefix and suffix). Inflection is most typically realized by adding an inflectional morpheme (i.e. affixation) to the base form (either the root (linguistics) or a stem (linguistics)). ==Relation to morphological typology== Inflection is sometimes confused with synthetic language in languages. The two terms are related but not the same. Languages are broadly classified Morphological typology into analytic language and synthetic language categories, or more realistically along a continuum between the two extremes. Analytic languages isolate meaning into individual words, whereas synthetic languages create words not found in the dictionary by fusing or agglutinating morpheme, sometimes to the extent of having a whole sentence's worth of meaning in a single word. Inflected languages by definition fall into the synthetic category, though not all synthetic languages need be inflected. ==Inflection in various languages== ===Highly inflected language families=== The Dravidian languages are highly inflected, as well as the Finno-Ugric languages and many Native American languages. ===Indo-European languages=== All Indo-European languages, such as English language, German language, Russian language, Spanish language, French language, Sanskrit language, and Hindi language are inflected to a greater or lesser extent. In general, older Indo-European languages such as Latin, Latvian language, and Lithuanian language are moderately inflected. Newer languages such as English and French have lost much of their historical inflection. Afrikaans language, an extremely young language, is almost completely uninflected and borders on being analytic language. Some branches of Indo-European (e.g. the Slavic languages) seem to have generally retained more inflection than others (e.g. Romance languages). ===English=== Old English language was a moderately inflected language, using an extensive case system similar to that of modern Icelandic language or German language. 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 three forms: an inflected form for the past indicative and subjunctive (''looked''), an inflected form for the third-person-singular present indicative (''looks''), and an uninflected form for everything else (''look''). While the English possessive indicator '''s'' (as in "Jane's book") is a remnant of the Old English genitive case suffix, it is now not a suffix but a clitic. ''See also declension in English.'' ===Other Germanic languages=== Old Norse language was inflected, but modern Swedish language, Norwegian language and Danish language have, like English, lost almost all inflection. Icelandic language preserves many of the inflections of Old Norse. Modern German language remains moderately inflected, retaining four noun cases, although the genitive began falling into disuse in the late 20th century in all but formal writing. The case system of Dutch language, simpler than German's, is also becoming more simplified in common usage. Afrikaans language, recognized as a distinct language in its own right rather than a Dutch dialect only in the early 20th century, has lost almost all inflection. ===East Asian languages=== Some of the major Eastern Asian languages (such as the various Chinese languages and Vietnamese language) are not inflected, or show very little inflection, so they are considered Analytic languages (a.k.a. ''isolating languages''). ===Japanese=== Japanese language, a probable language isolate, shows a high degree of inflection on verbs, less so on adjectives and nouns, but it is always strictly agglutinative language and extremely regular. Formally, every noun phrase must be case marker, but this is done by invariable particles (clitic postpositions). (Many grammarians consider Japanese particles to be separate words, and therefore not an inflection, while others consider agglutination a type of inflection, and therefore consider Japanese nouns inflected.) ===Basque=== Basque language, another language isolate, is an extremely inflected polysynthetic language language, heavily inflecting both nouns and verbs. A Basque noun is inflected in 17 different ways for case, multiplied by 4 ways for its definiteness and number. These first 68 forms are further modified based on other parts of the sentence, which in turn are inflected for the noun again. It's been estimated that at two levels of recursion, a Basque noun may have 458,683 inflected forms ([http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/A/A92/A92-1016.pdf Agirre et al, 1992]). Verb forms are similarly complex, agreeing with the subject, the direct object and several other verb arguments. ==Examples== ===English=== In English many nouns are inflected for grammatical number with the inflectional plural affix ''-s'' (as in "dog" → "dog-s"), and most English verbs are inflected for grammatical tense with the inflectional past tense affix ''-ed'' (as in "call" → "call-ed"). English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the third person singular in the present tense (with ''-s''), and the present participle (with ''-ing''). English short adjectives are inflected to mark comparative and superlative forms (with ''-er'' and ''-est'' respectively). In addition, English also shows inflection by Ablaut (mostly in verbs) and Umlaut (mostly in nouns), as well the odd long-short vowel alternation. For example: *''write, wrote, written'' (Ablaut, and also suffixing in the participle) *''sing, sang, sung'' (Ablaut) *''foot, feet'' (Umlaut) *''mouse, mice'' (Umlaut) *''child, children'' (vowel alternation, and also suffixing in the plural) A limited subset of English verbs and nouns are related by stress-change inflection. Such is the case of pairs like ''a record'' (noun, stressed on the first syllable) vs. ''to record'' (verb, stressed on the last). In the past, writers sometimes gave words such as ''doctor'', ''Negro'', ''dictator'', ''professor'', and ''orator'' Latin inflections to mark them as feminine, thus forming ''doctress'', ''Negress'', ''dictatrix'', ''professress'', and ''oratress''. The former words were never frequently used, although many English users continue to use Latin endings today in somewhat more common constructions such as ''actress'' and ''waitress''. German language, which is related to English, employs many of these inflectional devices, but Umlaut and Ablaut are widespread, while in English they are considered more like exceptions. ===Latin and Romance languages=== The Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, French, etc., are more inflectional than English, especially when it comes to verb forms. A single morpheme usually carries information about person, number, tense, aspect and mood, and the verb paradigm may be considerably complex. Nouns are simpler, but they are inflected by number and grammatical gender. There is no Ablaut or Umlaut, and only little predictable vowel alternation, found on certain verbs where the Latin root had the phonemes /E/ or /O/. Latin is in fact more complicated, showing Ablaut in the verb paradigm, and also some verb inflection for voice (which is realized only by syntactic means in its daughter languages), as well as a more complicated noun paradigm (with several patterns of declension, and three genders instead of the two found in most Romance tongues). ==External links== * [http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/i1/inflecti.asp Inflection entry at Encyclopedia.com] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsInflection.htm What is ''inflection''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnInflectionalAffix.htm What is an ''inflectional affix''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnInflectionalCategory.htm What is an ''inflectional category''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAMorphologicalProcess.htm What is a ''morphological process''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsDerivation.htm What is ''derivation''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/ComparisonOfInflectionAndDeriv.htm Comparison of inflection and derivation] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Inflection Inflection], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Derivation Derivation] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Conjugation Conjugation], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Declension Declension] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Base Base], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Stem Stem], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Root Root] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Defective+paradigm Defective Paradigm] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Strong+verb Strong Verb] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=IP Inflection Phrase (IP)], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=INFL INFL], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=AGR AGR], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=tense Tense] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Lexicalist+Hypothesis Lexicalist Hypothesis] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnAgglutinativeLanguage.htm What is an ''agglutinative language''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAFusionalLanguage.htm What is a ''fusional language''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnIsolatingLanguage.htm What is an ''isolating language''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPolysyntheticLanguage.htm What is a ''polysynthetic language''?] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Agglutinating+language Agglutinating Language], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Fusional+morphology Fusional Morphology], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=isolating+language Isolating Language], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=polysynthetic+language Polysynthetic Language] ==References and recommended reading== * Agirre, E.; Alegria I.; Arregi, X.; Artola, X.; Díaz de Ilarraza, A.; Maritxalar M.; et al. (1992). XUXEN: A spelling checker/corrector for Basque based on two-level morphology. ''Proceedings of the Third Conference of Applied Natural Language Processing''. Online version: http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/A/A92/A92-1016.pdf * Bauer, Laurie. (2003). ''Introducing linguistic morphology'' (2nd ed.). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. ISBN 0-878-40343-4. * Bubenik, Vit. (1999). ''An introduction to the study of morphology''. LINCON coursebooks in linguistics, 07. Muenchen: LINCOM Europa. ISBN 3-89586-570-2. * Haspelmath, Martin. (2002). ''Understanding morphology''. London: Arnold (co-published by Oxford University Press). ISBN 0-340-76025-7 (hb); ISBN 0-340-76206-5 (pbk). * Katamba, Francis. (1993). ''Morphology''. Modern linguistics series. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-10101-5 (hb); ISBN 0-312-10356-5 (pbk). * Matthews, Peter. (1991). ''Morphology'' (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-41043-6 (hb); ISBN 0-521-42256-6 (pbk). * Nichols, Johanna. (1986). Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar. ''Language'', ''62'' (1), 56-119. * de Reuse, Willem J. (forthcoming). ''A practical grammar of the San Carlos Apache language''. * Spencer, Andrew, & Zwicky, Arnold M. (Eds.) (1998). ''The handbook of morphology''. Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-18544-5. * Stump, Gregory T. (2001). ''Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure''. Cambridge studies in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-78047-0. * Van Valin, Robert D., Jr. (2001). ''An introduction to syntax''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-63566-7 (pbk); ISBN 0-521-63199-8 (hb). Linguistic morphology
What's with the new agglutination addition? I'm pretty sure that "weak inflection" is different from agglutination; things like the English third-person singular present verb suffix -''s'' is inflection rather than agglutination, because in agglutination one affix has one meaning (so the third person, the singular, and the present would each have their own affixes). Inflection is not limited to stem changes. -User:Branddobbe, 11:42 PST Wed Nov 26 2003 : Yeah, you're right Branddobbe, wanna fix the agglutination definition? ==aint no stub== By the way I think this ain't no stub no more. Anyone disagree? User:Steverapaport 14:28, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC) ==How is Inflection being confused with Synthesis?== : (moved question from User_talk:Ish_ishwar) Hi Ish. You've been putting lots of flags on Inflection without ever actually discussing the confusion you point out. If my understanding is correct, an inflected language changes nouns and/or verbs, by either agglutination or fusion, to reflect grammatical functions such as case, tense, mood, etc. A synthetic language is a term for languages that place more than one morpheme (meaning unit, including grammatical markers), into a single word By these definitions, all inflected languages are synthetic, though not all synthetic languages need be inflected, right? So how (other than organizationally) is the Inflection article in need of loving attention? Can you help me make it right? Best regards, User:Steverapaport 11:41, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC) : User:Ish ishwar reply: : Hi Steverapaport. I was hoping some of the authors would check this out at a library. : There are a number of things that I think need to be clarified. I am going to be fairly critical. The authors can decide that needs to be done. : First re: your question: :# Inflection is not restricted to nouns and verbs--adjectives & other grammatical categories may be inflected. :# One technical point: agglutinating & fusional refers mostly to the degree of segmentability of morphemes within a word. So, a language that has inflection will use inflectional morphemes. These words with inflectional morphemes may be described (in theory) as either agglutinating or fusional depending on how easily you can separate the individual morphemes. : about the Inflection entry: :# "inflected language" is not such good a term. :##Firstly, it is more common to use "inflectional language" instead of "inflected language". :## Secondly, using the term "inflected language" is not good due a confusion on these web pages between "inflection" and "degree of synthesis". Additionaly, "Inflectional language" has been used synonymously with "fusional language", but I dont recommend this usage. Comrie (1989: 45) has a nice discussion of this: "In place of the term fusional, one sometimes finds the term flectional, or even inflectional, used in the same sense. This is not done in the present work to avoid a potential terminological confusion: both agglutinating and fusional languages, as opposed to isolating languages, have inflections, and it is therefore misleading to use a term based on (in)flection to refer to one only of these two types. The availability of the alternate term fusional neatly solves the terminological dilemna." :# So the 1st sentence of the Inflection entry reads: "An Inflection or inflexion is a change of word form according to grammatical function, which occurs in inflected languages." What does the author mean by "inflected languages"? Fusional languages? Or a language that uses inflectional morphemes? If s/he means the latter, then this is partly a circular (and hence redundant) statement. :# 2nd paragraph. It seems that one could define inflection without recourse to the notion of degree of synthesis (i.e., isolating vs. synthetic langs). (Some may just want a clarification of what inflection is, but not really want to go into the details of morphological typology.) With this said, the paragraph is correct: all languages with inflectional morphemes will be synthetic languages. :# I think it would be good to point out that inflection does not include only affixation (i.e., prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes) and exclude morphological processes like reduplication & alternation. :# "on-the-fly"?? Does this feel to you like the author means isolating languages are more methodical or not as careless in their grammar? What does this mean? :# The entry mentions nothing of inflectional morphemes. Inflectional morphemes, in theory, contrast with derivational morphemes. In short, inflectional = morphemes indicating grammatical info (i.e., case, number, person, grammatical gender/word class, mood, mode, tense, aspect, other relational info); derivational = morphemes that change meaning, i.e., creating a new word from an existing word, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (noun to verb). I think that a good discussion of inflection needs to discuss derivation. :# "declension" & "conjugation" are traditional grammarian terms. An introductory linguistic textbook probably wont even mention them. But, they are useful to students of European langs. :# "weak" & "strong". I think that these terms are not so useful. I believe they are restricted in usage to mostly Indo-European langs, perhaps mostly in historical linguistics & in tradition grammar, especially with Germanic languages (Old English, proto-Germanic) (I have seen these terms referring to PIE, too). (However, I admit that I dont know so much about the usage of these...). Maybe these terms can be mentioned in passing. But, readers should know that these terms are not so widely used out of these contexts. (Somebody should check this out) :# "Linguistically, the former is strictly called agglutination, and the latter is the true sense of the word inflection." Wrong. Affixation does not entail agglutinating morphology, just look most of the languages in Europe. :# The first part of the entry seems to discuss inflection. The second section "Inflection in various languages" seems to discuss degree of synthesis. This is the main confusion I mention in #1.2 above & on my note on Synthetic languages entry. These are two different concepts. They are related in certain ways, but nonetheless different. Some books may confuse or fail to clarify them--maybe this is why they are confused in Wikipedia? Anyway, you can see why Comrie suggests not using "flectional" to mean "fusional". [I think that somehow the term "inflectional" was mistakenly equated with "synthetic" due to examples of synthesis used in some sources. Examples of synthesis commonly use Indo-European langs which often have many inflectional suffixes (since it is very easy to get examples of these from any grammar book). So, because of these examples & also maybe due to confusing terminology mentioned by Comrie (i.e., fusional = flectional), the Wikipedia authors were misled.] :# Although this information in the second section is useful & good, maybe it better belongs on the Synthetic languages page. Or maybe someone should create a Degree-of-synthesis page? (maybe not?). :# Why dont you give your full reference of (Agirre et al, 1992)? I think it would be nice for Basque learners & others interested in these things. It is a cool fact, maybe somebody wants to check out the source. So, I suggest making a References subsection. : The above is a lot, I know. I think that the writers need to consult an introductory linguistics text. A good one is :* Stewart, Thomas W., Jr.; & Vaillette, Nathan. (2001). Language files: Materials for an introduction to language & linguistics, (8th ed.). Columbus: Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University. : [But dont get the 9th edition! It has a lot of confusing errors (they changed from Americanist transcription to British IPA).] : References: * Comrie, Bernard. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology, (2nd ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [Originally published (1981)]. : User:Ish ishwar 18:59, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC) ==some links== Here are some sites you might want to check out: * [http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/i1/inflecti.asp an entry at encyclopedia.com] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsInflection.htm SIL: What is inflection?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnInflectionalAffix.htm SIL: What is an inflectional affix?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnInflectionalCategory.htm SIL: What is an inflectional category?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnAgglutinativeLanguage.htm SIL: What is an agglutinative language?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAFusionalLanguage.htm SIL: What is a fusional language?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnIsolatingLanguage.htm SIL: What is an isolating language?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPolysyntheticLanguage.htm SIL: What is a polysynthetic language?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAMorphologicalProcess.htm SIL: What is a morphological process?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsDerivation.htm SIL: What is derivation?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/ComparisonOfInflectionAndDeriv.htm SIL: Comparison of inflection and derivation] * [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/ Lexicon of Linguistics [a rather technical (too much so for most, I guess) dictionary/encyclopedia reference]] - Cheers! User:Ish ishwar 19:31, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC) == Wow == Ok, then, Ish. You've convinced me that even if I (or the other current authors) rewrote the page to clearly include all the distinctions you point out, I would lack the background to be properly clear. You've already done most of the work in your comment above, and you obviously have the background -- would you kindly consent to improve the page yourself? I promise not to object if you throw away all my work and substitute something clearer and more correct. Your idea for hyperlinks and references is well taken. I'll put in the Agirre reference when I find it again. Steve == We who are doomed to fail salute you == Ok Ish, even though you could have done a better job, I've taken up inflection User:Steverapaport 17:23, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC) :: Hi Steve - :: So, I finally got around to this. I am not finished, but it is a start. Please improve it in any way you see fit. - User:Ish ishwar 11:39, 2004 Dec 22 (UTC) ::: I like it a lot, Ish. Glad you came in and did the necessary work. Now that you've added the sections it cries out for more content, but it's past my level of expertise. I'm just cleaning up little bits now, hope you or Mark Dingemanse or someone else comes in and adds more to the anemic sections. ::: Best, User:Steverapaport 00:11, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC) ==Latin and Other Romance Languages== The bit about Latin and ablaut / umlaut is a bit confusing. The text here notes: * There is no Ablaut or Umlaut, and only little predictable vowel alternation, found on certain verbs where the Latin root had the phonemes /E/ or /O/. But then when I go look at the ablaut page, I find this: * Latin displays ablaut in verbs such as ago (present tense), "I drive"; egi, (perfect tense), "I drove". So which comment is correct? --- User:Eirikr 07:51, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC) :I've corrected that. The comment on "no Ablaut" belongs on the previous paragraph on Romance languages (which to my knowledge don't have Ablaut, or at least not a strong pattern of Ablaut inflection). Seems the Latin paragraph was added later (in the wrong place). My question would be: are some of the "irregular" vowel alternations found in Romance languages actually Ablaut carried over from Latin, or diachronical phonologically-conditioned changes of Latin vowels? I mean things like Spanish ''decir-digo'' or ''tener-tuve'' or ''morir-murió'', not the ''e/ie, o/ue'' alternation. Also, does Romanian (often forgotten in reviews of Romance languages) have Ablaut? --User:Pablo-flores 12:40, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC) ::Thanks for clearing that up, Pablo. And the new question you bring up is a good one -- the vowel shifts there in Spanish certainly seem like the ablaut talked about in strong verbs, where vowel shifts indicated tense/aspect. --- User:Eirikr 06:26, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
See other meanings of words starting from letter:
Words begining with Inflection:
Inflection
Inflection
Inflectional_language
Inflectional_morpheme
Inflectional_morphology
Inflections
Inflection_point
Inflection
:''This article is about inflection in linguistics. For a mathematical meaning, see Stationary point.'' Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marker (linguistics) of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i.e. relational) information, such as grammatical gender, grammatical tense, grammatical person, etc. ==Declension and conjugation== Those who study grammar may be familiar with two traditional grammatical terms that refer to inflectional paradigms of specific word classes: * Declension: noun inflectional paradigm (often includes pronouns, adjectives, and demonstratives as well) (often involving grammatical number, noun case, or grammatical gender). * grammatical conjugation: verb inflectional paradigm (often involving grammatical number, grammatical person, tense, or grammatical mood). Below is an example of a noun declension of the Latin noun ''vir'' 'man'. It is inflected for case and number with suffixes. {| border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="4" |- | | ''Singular'' | ''Plural'' |- | ''Nom.'' | vir | vir-ī |- | ''Gen.'' | vir-ī | vir-ōrum |- | ''Dat.'' | vir-ō | vir-īs |- | ''Acc.'' | vir-um | vir-ōs |- | ''Abl.'' | vir-ō | vir-īs |} Below is a conjugation of the verb ''hi'' 'arrive' in Lakota language. It is inflected for person with prefixes and for number with the suffix ''-pi''. {| border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="4" |- | | colspan="2" align="center"| ''Singular (/dual)'' | colspan="2" align="center"| ''Plural'' |- | ''1st'' | align="right" | wa-hi | 'I arrive' | colspan="2" align="center" | - |- | ''Inclusive (dual)'' |align="right"| ų-hi | 'you & I arrive' |align="right"| ų-hi-pi | 'we arrive' |- | ''2nd'' |align="right"| ya-hi | 'you arrive' |align="right"| ya-hi-pi | 'you all arrive' |- | ''3rd'' |align="right"| hi | 'he arrives' |align="right"| hi-pi | 'they arrive' |} However, these two terms seem to be biased toward well-known dependent-marking languages (such as Spanish, Latin, German, Russian, Japanese etc.). In dependent-marking languages, nouns in adposition can carry inflectional morphemes. (Adpositions include prepositions and postpositions.) In head-marking languages, the adpositions can carry the inflection in adpositional phrases. This means that these languages will have inflectional paradigms involving adpositions. In Western Apache (San Carlos, Arizona dialect), the postposition ''-ká’'' 'on' is inflected for person and number with prefixes. {| BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="2" CELLPADDING="4" |- | |COLSPAN=2 align="center"| ''Singular'' |COLSPAN=2 align="center"| ''Dual'' |COLSPAN=2 align="center"| ''Plural'' |- | ''1st'' |align="right"| shi-ká’ | 'on me' |align="right"| noh-ká’ | 'on us two' |align="right"| da-noh-ká’ | 'on us' |- | ''2nd'' |align="right"| ni-ká’ | 'on you' |align="right"| nohwi-ká’ | 'on you two' |align="right"| da-nohwi-ká’ | 'on you all' |- | ''3rd'' |align="right"| bi-ká’ | 'on him' |COLSPAN=2 align="center"| - |align="right"| da-bi-ká’ | 'on them' |} Traditional grammars have specific terms for noun and verb paradigms but not for adpositional paradigms. ==Inflection vs. derivation== Inflection is the process of adding ''inflectional morphemes'' (atomic meaning units) to a word, which may indicate grammatical information (i.e., case, number, person, grammatical gender/word class, mood, mode, tense, aspect, other relational info). Compare with derivation (linguistics), which create a new word from an existing word, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (e.g., changing a noun to a verb). Words generally do not appear in dictionaries with inflectional morphemes. But they often do appear with derivational morphemes. For instance, English dictionaries list ''readable'' and ''readability'', words with derivational suffixes, along with their root ''read''. However, no English dictionary will list ''book'' as one entry and ''books'' as a separate entry nor will they list ''jump'' and ''jumped'' as two different entries. In some languages, inflected words do not appear in a fundamental form (the Root morpheme) except in dictionaries and grammars. ==Inflectional morphology== Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called ''inflectional languages''. Morphemes may be added in several different ways: *affix, or simply adding morphemes onto the word without changing the root, *reduplication, doubling all or part of a word to change its meaning, *alternation (linguistics), exchanging one sound for another in the root (usually vowel sounds, as in the Ablaut process found in Germanic Strong verbs and the Umlaut often found in nouns, among others). *lexical stress, pitch accent and tonal language, where no sounds are added or changed but the intonation and relative strength of each sound is altered regularly. A schema of all inflections for a word is sometimes called a paradigm. Affixing includes prefixing (adding before the base), and suffixing (adding after the base), as well as the much less common infixing (inside) and circumfixing (a combination of prefix and suffix). Inflection is most typically realized by adding an inflectional morpheme (i.e. affixation) to the base form (either the root (linguistics) or a stem (linguistics)). ==Relation to morphological typology== Inflection is sometimes confused with synthetic language in languages. The two terms are related but not the same. Languages are broadly classified Morphological typology into analytic language and synthetic language categories, or more realistically along a continuum between the two extremes. Analytic languages isolate meaning into individual words, whereas synthetic languages create words not found in the dictionary by fusing or agglutinating morpheme, sometimes to the extent of having a whole sentence's worth of meaning in a single word. Inflected languages by definition fall into the synthetic category, though not all synthetic languages need be inflected. ==Inflection in various languages== ===Highly inflected language families=== The Dravidian languages are highly inflected, as well as the Finno-Ugric languages and many Native American languages. ===Indo-European languages=== All Indo-European languages, such as English language, German language, Russian language, Spanish language, French language, Sanskrit language, and Hindi language are inflected to a greater or lesser extent. In general, older Indo-European languages such as Latin, Latvian language, and Lithuanian language are moderately inflected. Newer languages such as English and French have lost much of their historical inflection. Afrikaans language, an extremely young language, is almost completely uninflected and borders on being analytic language. Some branches of Indo-European (e.g. the Slavic languages) seem to have generally retained more inflection than others (e.g. Romance languages). ===English=== Old English language was a moderately inflected language, using an extensive case system similar to that of modern Icelandic language or German language. 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 three forms: an inflected form for the past indicative and subjunctive (''looked''), an inflected form for the third-person-singular present indicative (''looks''), and an uninflected form for everything else (''look''). While the English possessive indicator '''s'' (as in "Jane's book") is a remnant of the Old English genitive case suffix, it is now not a suffix but a clitic. ''See also declension in English.'' ===Other Germanic languages=== Old Norse language was inflected, but modern Swedish language, Norwegian language and Danish language have, like English, lost almost all inflection. Icelandic language preserves many of the inflections of Old Norse. Modern German language remains moderately inflected, retaining four noun cases, although the genitive began falling into disuse in the late 20th century in all but formal writing. The case system of Dutch language, simpler than German's, is also becoming more simplified in common usage. Afrikaans language, recognized as a distinct language in its own right rather than a Dutch dialect only in the early 20th century, has lost almost all inflection. ===East Asian languages=== Some of the major Eastern Asian languages (such as the various Chinese languages and Vietnamese language) are not inflected, or show very little inflection, so they are considered Analytic languages (a.k.a. ''isolating languages''). ===Japanese=== Japanese language, a probable language isolate, shows a high degree of inflection on verbs, less so on adjectives and nouns, but it is always strictly agglutinative language and extremely regular. Formally, every noun phrase must be case marker, but this is done by invariable particles (clitic postpositions). (Many grammarians consider Japanese particles to be separate words, and therefore not an inflection, while others consider agglutination a type of inflection, and therefore consider Japanese nouns inflected.) ===Basque=== Basque language, another language isolate, is an extremely inflected polysynthetic language language, heavily inflecting both nouns and verbs. A Basque noun is inflected in 17 different ways for case, multiplied by 4 ways for its definiteness and number. These first 68 forms are further modified based on other parts of the sentence, which in turn are inflected for the noun again. It's been estimated that at two levels of recursion, a Basque noun may have 458,683 inflected forms ([http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/A/A92/A92-1016.pdf Agirre et al, 1992]). Verb forms are similarly complex, agreeing with the subject, the direct object and several other verb arguments. ==Examples== ===English=== In English many nouns are inflected for grammatical number with the inflectional plural affix ''-s'' (as in "dog" → "dog-s"), and most English verbs are inflected for grammatical tense with the inflectional past tense affix ''-ed'' (as in "call" → "call-ed"). English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the third person singular in the present tense (with ''-s''), and the present participle (with ''-ing''). English short adjectives are inflected to mark comparative and superlative forms (with ''-er'' and ''-est'' respectively). In addition, English also shows inflection by Ablaut (mostly in verbs) and Umlaut (mostly in nouns), as well the odd long-short vowel alternation. For example: *''write, wrote, written'' (Ablaut, and also suffixing in the participle) *''sing, sang, sung'' (Ablaut) *''foot, feet'' (Umlaut) *''mouse, mice'' (Umlaut) *''child, children'' (vowel alternation, and also suffixing in the plural) A limited subset of English verbs and nouns are related by stress-change inflection. Such is the case of pairs like ''a record'' (noun, stressed on the first syllable) vs. ''to record'' (verb, stressed on the last). In the past, writers sometimes gave words such as ''doctor'', ''Negro'', ''dictator'', ''professor'', and ''orator'' Latin inflections to mark them as feminine, thus forming ''doctress'', ''Negress'', ''dictatrix'', ''professress'', and ''oratress''. The former words were never frequently used, although many English users continue to use Latin endings today in somewhat more common constructions such as ''actress'' and ''waitress''. German language, which is related to English, employs many of these inflectional devices, but Umlaut and Ablaut are widespread, while in English they are considered more like exceptions. ===Latin and Romance languages=== The Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, French, etc., are more inflectional than English, especially when it comes to verb forms. A single morpheme usually carries information about person, number, tense, aspect and mood, and the verb paradigm may be considerably complex. Nouns are simpler, but they are inflected by number and grammatical gender. There is no Ablaut or Umlaut, and only little predictable vowel alternation, found on certain verbs where the Latin root had the phonemes /E/ or /O/. Latin is in fact more complicated, showing Ablaut in the verb paradigm, and also some verb inflection for voice (which is realized only by syntactic means in its daughter languages), as well as a more complicated noun paradigm (with several patterns of declension, and three genders instead of the two found in most Romance tongues). ==External links== * [http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/i1/inflecti.asp Inflection entry at Encyclopedia.com] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsInflection.htm What is ''inflection''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnInflectionalAffix.htm What is an ''inflectional affix''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnInflectionalCategory.htm What is an ''inflectional category''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAMorphologicalProcess.htm What is a ''morphological process''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsDerivation.htm What is ''derivation''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/ComparisonOfInflectionAndDeriv.htm Comparison of inflection and derivation] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Inflection Inflection], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Derivation Derivation] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Conjugation Conjugation], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Declension Declension] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Base Base], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Stem Stem], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Root Root] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Defective+paradigm Defective Paradigm] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Strong+verb Strong Verb] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=IP Inflection Phrase (IP)], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=INFL INFL], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=AGR AGR], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=tense Tense] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Lexicalist+Hypothesis Lexicalist Hypothesis] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnAgglutinativeLanguage.htm What is an ''agglutinative language''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAFusionalLanguage.htm What is a ''fusional language''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnIsolatingLanguage.htm What is an ''isolating language''?] * SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPolysyntheticLanguage.htm What is a ''polysynthetic language''?] * Lexicon of Linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Agglutinating+language Agglutinating Language], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Fusional+morphology Fusional Morphology], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=isolating+language Isolating Language], [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=polysynthetic+language Polysynthetic Language] ==References and recommended reading== * Agirre, E.; Alegria I.; Arregi, X.; Artola, X.; Díaz de Ilarraza, A.; Maritxalar M.; et al. (1992). XUXEN: A spelling checker/corrector for Basque based on two-level morphology. ''Proceedings of the Third Conference of Applied Natural Language Processing''. Online version: http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/A/A92/A92-1016.pdf * Bauer, Laurie. (2003). ''Introducing linguistic morphology'' (2nd ed.). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. ISBN 0-878-40343-4. * Bubenik, Vit. (1999). ''An introduction to the study of morphology''. LINCON coursebooks in linguistics, 07. Muenchen: LINCOM Europa. ISBN 3-89586-570-2. * Haspelmath, Martin. (2002). ''Understanding morphology''. London: Arnold (co-published by Oxford University Press). ISBN 0-340-76025-7 (hb); ISBN 0-340-76206-5 (pbk). * Katamba, Francis. (1993). ''Morphology''. Modern linguistics series. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-10101-5 (hb); ISBN 0-312-10356-5 (pbk). * Matthews, Peter. (1991). ''Morphology'' (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-41043-6 (hb); ISBN 0-521-42256-6 (pbk). * Nichols, Johanna. (1986). Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar. ''Language'', ''62'' (1), 56-119. * de Reuse, Willem J. (forthcoming). ''A practical grammar of the San Carlos Apache language''. * Spencer, Andrew, & Zwicky, Arnold M. (Eds.) (1998). ''The handbook of morphology''. Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-18544-5. * Stump, Gregory T. (2001). ''Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure''. Cambridge studies in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-78047-0. * Van Valin, Robert D., Jr. (2001). ''An introduction to syntax''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-63566-7 (pbk); ISBN 0-521-63199-8 (hb). Linguistic morphology
Inflection
What's with the new agglutination addition? I'm pretty sure that "weak inflection" is different from agglutination; things like the English third-person singular present verb suffix -''s'' is inflection rather than agglutination, because in agglutination one affix has one meaning (so the third person, the singular, and the present would each have their own affixes). Inflection is not limited to stem changes. -User:Branddobbe, 11:42 PST Wed Nov 26 2003 : Yeah, you're right Branddobbe, wanna fix the agglutination definition? ==aint no stub== By the way I think this ain't no stub no more. Anyone disagree? User:Steverapaport 14:28, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC) ==How is Inflection being confused with Synthesis?== : (moved question from User_talk:Ish_ishwar) Hi Ish. You've been putting lots of flags on Inflection without ever actually discussing the confusion you point out. If my understanding is correct, an inflected language changes nouns and/or verbs, by either agglutination or fusion, to reflect grammatical functions such as case, tense, mood, etc. A synthetic language is a term for languages that place more than one morpheme (meaning unit, including grammatical markers), into a single word By these definitions, all inflected languages are synthetic, though not all synthetic languages need be inflected, right? So how (other than organizationally) is the Inflection article in need of loving attention? Can you help me make it right? Best regards, User:Steverapaport 11:41, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC) : User:Ish ishwar reply: : Hi Steverapaport. I was hoping some of the authors would check this out at a library. : There are a number of things that I think need to be clarified. I am going to be fairly critical. The authors can decide that needs to be done. : First re: your question: :# Inflection is not restricted to nouns and verbs--adjectives & other grammatical categories may be inflected. :# One technical point: agglutinating & fusional refers mostly to the degree of segmentability of morphemes within a word. So, a language that has inflection will use inflectional morphemes. These words with inflectional morphemes may be described (in theory) as either agglutinating or fusional depending on how easily you can separate the individual morphemes. : about the Inflection entry: :# "inflected language" is not such good a term. :##Firstly, it is more common to use "inflectional language" instead of "inflected language". :## Secondly, using the term "inflected language" is not good due a confusion on these web pages between "inflection" and "degree of synthesis". Additionaly, "Inflectional language" has been used synonymously with "fusional language", but I dont recommend this usage. Comrie (1989: 45) has a nice discussion of this: "In place of the term fusional, one sometimes finds the term flectional, or even inflectional, used in the same sense. This is not done in the present work to avoid a potential terminological confusion: both agglutinating and fusional languages, as opposed to isolating languages, have inflections, and it is therefore misleading to use a term based on (in)flection to refer to one only of these two types. The availability of the alternate term fusional neatly solves the terminological dilemna." :# So the 1st sentence of the Inflection entry reads: "An Inflection or inflexion is a change of word form according to grammatical function, which occurs in inflected languages." What does the author mean by "inflected languages"? Fusional languages? Or a language that uses inflectional morphemes? If s/he means the latter, then this is partly a circular (and hence redundant) statement. :# 2nd paragraph. It seems that one could define inflection without recourse to the notion of degree of synthesis (i.e., isolating vs. synthetic langs). (Some may just want a clarification of what inflection is, but not really want to go into the details of morphological typology.) With this said, the paragraph is correct: all languages with inflectional morphemes will be synthetic languages. :# I think it would be good to point out that inflection does not include only affixation (i.e., prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes) and exclude morphological processes like reduplication & alternation. :# "on-the-fly"?? Does this feel to you like the author means isolating languages are more methodical or not as careless in their grammar? What does this mean? :# The entry mentions nothing of inflectional morphemes. Inflectional morphemes, in theory, contrast with derivational morphemes. In short, inflectional = morphemes indicating grammatical info (i.e., case, number, person, grammatical gender/word class, mood, mode, tense, aspect, other relational info); derivational = morphemes that change meaning, i.e., creating a new word from an existing word, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (noun to verb). I think that a good discussion of inflection needs to discuss derivation. :# "declension" & "conjugation" are traditional grammarian terms. An introductory linguistic textbook probably wont even mention them. But, they are useful to students of European langs. :# "weak" & "strong". I think that these terms are not so useful. I believe they are restricted in usage to mostly Indo-European langs, perhaps mostly in historical linguistics & in tradition grammar, especially with Germanic languages (Old English, proto-Germanic) (I have seen these terms referring to PIE, too). (However, I admit that I dont know so much about the usage of these...). Maybe these terms can be mentioned in passing. But, readers should know that these terms are not so widely used out of these contexts. (Somebody should check this out) :# "Linguistically, the former is strictly called agglutination, and the latter is the true sense of the word inflection." Wrong. Affixation does not entail agglutinating morphology, just look most of the languages in Europe. :# The first part of the entry seems to discuss inflection. The second section "Inflection in various languages" seems to discuss degree of synthesis. This is the main confusion I mention in #1.2 above & on my note on Synthetic languages entry. These are two different concepts. They are related in certain ways, but nonetheless different. Some books may confuse or fail to clarify them--maybe this is why they are confused in Wikipedia? Anyway, you can see why Comrie suggests not using "flectional" to mean "fusional". [I think that somehow the term "inflectional" was mistakenly equated with "synthetic" due to examples of synthesis used in some sources. Examples of synthesis commonly use Indo-European langs which often have many inflectional suffixes (since it is very easy to get examples of these from any grammar book). So, because of these examples & also maybe due to confusing terminology mentioned by Comrie (i.e., fusional = flectional), the Wikipedia authors were misled.] :# Although this information in the second section is useful & good, maybe it better belongs on the Synthetic languages page. Or maybe someone should create a Degree-of-synthesis page? (maybe not?). :# Why dont you give your full reference of (Agirre et al, 1992)? I think it would be nice for Basque learners & others interested in these things. It is a cool fact, maybe somebody wants to check out the source. So, I suggest making a References subsection. : The above is a lot, I know. I think that the writers need to consult an introductory linguistics text. A good one is :* Stewart, Thomas W., Jr.; & Vaillette, Nathan. (2001). Language files: Materials for an introduction to language & linguistics, (8th ed.). Columbus: Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University. : [But dont get the 9th edition! It has a lot of confusing errors (they changed from Americanist transcription to British IPA).] : References: * Comrie, Bernard. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology, (2nd ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [Originally published (1981)]. : User:Ish ishwar 18:59, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC) ==some links== Here are some sites you might want to check out: * [http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/i1/inflecti.asp an entry at encyclopedia.com] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsInflection.htm SIL: What is inflection?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnInflectionalAffix.htm SIL: What is an inflectional affix?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnInflectionalCategory.htm SIL: What is an inflectional category?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnAgglutinativeLanguage.htm SIL: What is an agglutinative language?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAFusionalLanguage.htm SIL: What is a fusional language?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnIsolatingLanguage.htm SIL: What is an isolating language?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPolysyntheticLanguage.htm SIL: What is a polysynthetic language?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAMorphologicalProcess.htm SIL: What is a morphological process?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsDerivation.htm SIL: What is derivation?] * [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/ComparisonOfInflectionAndDeriv.htm SIL: Comparison of inflection and derivation] * [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/ Lexicon of Linguistics [a rather technical (too much so for most, I guess) dictionary/encyclopedia reference]] - Cheers! User:Ish ishwar 19:31, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC) == Wow == Ok, then, Ish. You've convinced me that even if I (or the other current authors) rewrote the page to clearly include all the distinctions you point out, I would lack the background to be properly clear. You've already done most of the work in your comment above, and you obviously have the background -- would you kindly consent to improve the page yourself? I promise not to object if you throw away all my work and substitute something clearer and more correct. Your idea for hyperlinks and references is well taken. I'll put in the Agirre reference when I find it again. Steve == We who are doomed to fail salute you == Ok Ish, even though you could have done a better job, I've taken up inflection User:Steverapaport 17:23, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC) :: Hi Steve - :: So, I finally got around to this. I am not finished, but it is a start. Please improve it in any way you see fit. - User:Ish ishwar 11:39, 2004 Dec 22 (UTC) ::: I like it a lot, Ish. Glad you came in and did the necessary work. Now that you've added the sections it cries out for more content, but it's past my level of expertise. I'm just cleaning up little bits now, hope you or Mark Dingemanse or someone else comes in and adds more to the anemic sections. ::: Best, User:Steverapaport 00:11, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC) ==Latin and Other Romance Languages== The bit about Latin and ablaut / umlaut is a bit confusing. The text here notes: * There is no Ablaut or Umlaut, and only little predictable vowel alternation, found on certain verbs where the Latin root had the phonemes /E/ or /O/. But then when I go look at the ablaut page, I find this: * Latin displays ablaut in verbs such as ago (present tense), "I drive"; egi, (perfect tense), "I drove". So which comment is correct? --- User:Eirikr 07:51, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC) :I've corrected that. The comment on "no Ablaut" belongs on the previous paragraph on Romance languages (which to my knowledge don't have Ablaut, or at least not a strong pattern of Ablaut inflection). Seems the Latin paragraph was added later (in the wrong place). My question would be: are some of the "irregular" vowel alternations found in Romance languages actually Ablaut carried over from Latin, or diachronical phonologically-conditioned changes of Latin vowels? I mean things like Spanish ''decir-digo'' or ''tener-tuve'' or ''morir-murió'', not the ''e/ie, o/ue'' alternation. Also, does Romanian (often forgotten in reviews of Romance languages) have Ablaut? --User:Pablo-flores 12:40, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC) ::Thanks for clearing that up, Pablo. And the new question you bring up is a good one -- the vowel shifts there in Spanish certainly seem like the ablaut talked about in strong verbs, where vowel shifts indicated tense/aspect. --- User:Eirikr 06:26, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
See other meanings of words starting from letter:
I
IA | IB | IC | ID | IE | IF | IG | IH | IJ | IK | IL | IM | IN | IO | IP | IR | IS | IT | IU | IW | IX | IY | IZ |Words begining with Inflection:
Inflection
Inflection
Inflectional_language
Inflectional_morpheme
Inflectional_morphology
Inflections
Inflection_point
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