Is there inflection in modern English?
Despite the march towards regularization, modern English retains traces of its ancestry, with a minority of its words still using inflection by ablaut (sound change, mostly in verbs) and umlaut (a particular type of sound change, mostly in nouns), as well as long-short vowel alternation.
How are verbs inflected in the English language?
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). There are nine inflectional affixes in the English language.
Is English a weakly inflected language?
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 form for the third-person-singular present indicative (looks), Click to see full answer.
What is the inflected form of present tense in English?
Another inflected form of English verbs is the third person singular of the present tense, which is regularly formed by the addition of-s or-es to the base form of the verb. This inflected form is not shown except at a handful of entries (as have and do) for which it is in some way anomalous.
Why does English have no inflection?
The reason why English lost most of its inflection actually has very little to do with grammar at all - it is caused by sound change. English heavily reduced all non-accented syllables, which, given the IE inflection being based on suffixes and endings, resulted in mergers and loss of most of these endings.
How many inflections does English have?
Introduction: Inflectional Morphemes in English Thus, there are only 8 inflectional morphemes that indicate at the form and the tense of a word. The list of inflectional morphemes includes: s – is an indicator of a plural form of nouns. s' – marks the possessive form of nouns.
What is English inflection?
inflection, formerly flection or accidence, in linguistics, the change in the form of a word (in English, usually the addition of endings) to mark such distinctions as tense, person, number, gender, mood, voice, and case.
What languages are inflected?
a language that changes the form or ending of some words when the way in which they are used in sentences changes: Latin, Polish, and Finnish are all highly inflected languages.
Is Japanese an inflected language?
Unlike Chinese, Japanese is a highly inflected language with words changing their ending depending on case, number, etc. For this reason, the hiragana and katakana syllabaries were created. The hiragana serve largely to show the inflection of words, as conjunctions and such.
Is Chinese an inflected language?
The grammar of Standard Chinese or Mandarin shares many features with other varieties of Chinese. The language almost entirely lacks inflection; words typically have only one grammatical form.
Is English language inflectional complex or simple?
Although some languages are highly inflected with complex inflection systems, English is fairly simple in this regard.
Is Spanish an inflected language?
Spanish is a grammatically inflected language, which means that many words are modified ("marked") in small ways, usually at the end, according to their changing functions. Verbs are marked for tense, aspect, mood, person, and number (resulting in up to fifty conjugated forms per verb).
Is Russian an inflected language?
Russian grammar employs an Indo-European inflexional structure, with considerable adaptation. Russian has a highly inflectional morphology, particularly in nominals (nouns, pronouns, adjectives and numerals).
Is English an isolating language?
Isolating and analytic languages tend to coincide and are often identified. However, analytic languages such as English may still contain polymorphemic words in part because of the presence of derivational morphemes. Isolating languages contrast with synthetic languages, where words often consist of multiple morphemes.
Is English a tonal language?
Tone is associated with lexical meaning, distinguishing one word from another. Diacritical marks are used for indicating tone to eliminate confusion. The general conclusion is English, is not a tonal language. English is an intonation language which expresses syntactic, discourse, grammatical and attitudinal functions.
Is English agglutinative or fusional?
Additionally, English is moderately analytic, and it and Afrikaans can be considered as some of the most analytic of all Indo-European languages. However, they are traditionally analyzed as fusional languages.
What does "inflected" mean in a language?
However, when people talk about “inflected languages,” they often specifically mean a language that has full declension system —i.e., languages in which the nouns gain extra endings to indicate if the word is a subject, an object, a possessive, and so forth. Languages will full declensions systems usually do not require a specific word order or else the word order is much looser.
What does it mean when a word is inflected?
In its broadest sense, an inflection merely means “you can change the form of words to change some aspect of meaning.” So, any language that conjugates verbs is technically inflected, or which uses different forms of a word (dog/dogs) to indicate a plural or use different forms of a word to show gendered roles for professions (actor/actress).
What is the meaning of sticking affixes to words?
Morphology is sticking affixes to words to form an agreement relation, change their meaning, change their word class, definiteness, or whatever.
Is English an inflected language?
Technically, yes. But when compared to languages like Fren ch etc, English can’t be seriously called an “inflected language”. It would be like saying that women have a beard simply because they have facial hair, just like men, even though theirs is much thinner and barely visible. 34 views. ·.
Is "inflection" a pronoun in Chinese?
Never very much. Old Chinese did have distinctions between subject personal pronouns and object personal pronouns, sometimes related, so it could be considered inflection. It did have a very small number of affixes, mainly suffixes, mostly descended from Proto-Sino-Tibetan, but in Old Chinese they often did not have clear grammatical meaning. One can see some remnants of that in modern Chinese, where two words of a related meaning are similar, due to one of them having had some affix in Old Chinese. But in modern Chinese they can’t be considered affixes.
Is French inflected?
It’s not fully inflected to show declension the way Latin was, but French is still inflected to show singular/plural and masculine/feminine.
What is inflection in English?
Updated July 17, 2019. Inflection refers to a process of word formation in which items are added to the base form of a word to express grammatical meanings. The word "inflection" comes from the Latin inflectere, meaning "to bend.". Inflections in English grammar include the genitive 's; the plural -s;
What does "inflection ED" mean?
The inflection -ed is often used to indicate the past tense, changing walk to walked and listen to listened. In this way, inflections are used to show grammatical categories such as tense , person, and number. Inflections can also be used to indicate a word's part of speech.
What are some examples of inflected sounds?
Not all English words follow the rules in this table. Some are inflected using sound changes known as vowel alternations, the most common of which are ablauts and umlauts. The word "teach," for example, is marked as past tense by changing its vowel sound, producing the word "taught" (rather than "teached"). Likewise, the word "goose" is pluralized by changing its vowel sound to produce the word "geese." Other irregular plurals include words like "oxen," "children," and "teeth."
What are the rules for inflection?
The most common rules are listed below. Part of Speech. Grammatical Category. Inflection. Examples. Noun. Number. -s, -es.
What is the stem of a word?
A stem is what remains of a word when any inflections are removed from it. In other words, inflections are added to the stem of a word. So frogs is made up of the stem frog and the inflection -s, while turned is made up of the stem turn and the inflection -ed .
What is the inflected form of a verb?
Another inflected form of English verbs is the third person singular of the present tense, which is regularly formed by the addition of -s or -es to the base form of the verb. This inflected form is not shown except at a handful of entries (as have and do) for which it is in some way anomalous.
When are the principal parts of a regularly inflected verb shown?
The principal parts of a regularly inflected verb are shown when it is desirable to indicate the pronunciation of one of the inflected forms:
When are comparative and superlative forms of regularly inflected adjectives and adverbs shown?
The comparative and superlative forms of regularly inflected adjectives and adverbs are shown when it is desirable to indicate the pronunciation of the inflected forms:
When are the principal parts of verbs not shown?
The principal parts of verbs are usually not shown when the base word is unchanged by suffixation or when the verb is a compound whose second element is readily recognizable as a regular free form entered at its own place: 1jump . . . verb. pre·judge . . . transitive verb.
When to use cutback inflected form?
Cutback inflected forms are often used when the verb has three or more syllables, when it is a disyllable that ends in -l and has variant spellings , and when it is a compound whose second element is readily recognized as an irregular verb: elim·i·nate . . . verb -nat·ed; -nat·ing.
Does English have inflected forms?
Inflected Forms. In comparison with some other languages, English does not have many inflected forms. Of those which it has, several are inflected forms of words belonging to small, closed groups (as the personal pronouns or the demonstratives). These forms can readily be found at their own alphabetical places with a full entry (as whom, ...
Which language has more inflection?
The Romance languages, such as Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian, have more overt inflection than English, especially in verb conjugation. Adjectives, nouns and articles are considerably less inflected than verbs, but they still have different forms according to number and grammatical gender.
What is the inflection of verbs called?
The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles etc., as declension .
What is the process of inflection?
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation, in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, ...
What is it called when a word class is subject to inflection?
When a given word class is subject to inflection in a particular language, there are generally one or more standard patterns of inflection (the paradigms described below) that words in that class may follow. Words which follow such a standard pattern are said to be regular; those that inflect differently are called irregular .
What is the difference between fusional and agglutinative languages?
Languages in which each inflection conveys only a single grammatical category, such as Finnish, are known as agglutinative languages, while languages in which a single inflection can convey multiple grammatical roles (such as both nominative case and plural, as in Latin and German) are called fusion al .
Is "play" a regular verb?
For instance, many languages that feature verb inflection have both regular verbs and irregular verbs. In English, regular verbs form their past tense and past participle with the ending - [e]d; thus verbs like play, arrive and enter are regular. However, there are a few hundred verbs which follow different patterns, such as sing–sang–sung and keep–kept–kept; these are described as irregular. Irregular verbs often preserve patterns which were regular in past forms of the language, but which have now become anomalous; in rare cases, there are regular verbs that were irregular in past forms of the language. (For more details see English verbs and English irregular verbs .)
Is German inflection in Afrikaans?
The case system of Dutch, simpler than that of German, is also simplified in common usage. Afrikaans, 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.
What is inflection in grammar?
Inflection refers to the way we change the form of a word to show different parts of grammar such as voice, person, number, gender, mood, tense or case. A simple example is when we change I to me depending on where it is used in a sentence. The person remains the same, the word changes. I love you.
Why Inflect?
In the early days of English the language was much more highly inflected. This inflection was used to show who was speaking and what they were talking about. However, over the years English has lost much of its inflection.
Why is inflection important?
As you can see, inflection is an important part of language learning since conjugations and declensions can have a great impact on the meaning of an utterance and mistakes in inflection are easily noted.
What is the inflection of nouns, adjectives and pronouns called?
Note that when the inflection is on a verb, we refer to it as conjugation while the inflection of nouns, adjectives and pronouns is called declension.
Where are inflections found?
Inflections in English are only found in suffixes ( at the end of the word stem) and they are always attached to completed words. For example: Boy s. Mary ’s. swim ming. Note that in many other languages inflection occurs in prefixes (before the stem of the word) and sometimes in infixes (within the stem of the word).
What is the only word your class might benefit from knowing?
In fact, the only word your class might benefit from knowing is conjugation.
Who explains inflections like this?
The grammarian Greenbaum explains inflections like this (from The Oxford English Grammar. Oxford Univ. Press, 1996 ):