Introduction to inflection

Inflection is the process by which words (or phrases) are marked for certain grammatical features. Perhaps the most common way that languages accomplish this marking is by ‘adding’ a morpheme to the end of a word (in which case this morpheme is known as a suffix). For example, many languages (including English) add a particular marker (in this case, -ed) to denote past tense (e.g., play-ed). Similarly, many languages (though not English) attach a suffix to verbs to encode the grammatical feature of gender. In Russian, the verb form igral (= was playing) refers to a male, and igrala a female. The study of the way in which these morphemes are added to words to mark grammatical features is the study of inflectional morphology.

What other grammatical features are encoded by inflection? Although some languages encode features such as humanness, approximate distance, shape, whether or not the speaker actually witnessed the event discussed, and so on (Slobin, 1982), we will focus here on four grammatical features that – it is probably fair to say – are represented in the majority of the world's languages that use inflection: Tense, Person, Number (verb inflection) and Case (noun/pronoun inflection).