Accordingly, the word forms of a lexeme may be arranged conveniently into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case.

The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily ; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language.

For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject.

The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given " piece " of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, " third person plural.

Agglutinative languages are often contrasted both with languages in which syntactic structure is expressed solely by means of word order and auxiliary words ( isolating languages ) and with languages in which a single affix typically expresses several syntactic categories and a single category may be expressed by several different affixes ( as is the case in inflectional ( fusional ) languages ).

The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given " piece " of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, " third person plural.

Some examples of affective forms are: diminutives ( for example, diminutive affixes in Indo-European and Amerindian languages indicate sympathy, endearment, emotional closeness, or antipathy, condescension, and emotional distance ); ideophones and onomatopoeias ; expletives, exclamations, interjections, curses, insults, and imprecations ( said to be " dramatizations of actions or states "); intonation change ( common in tone languages such as Japanese ); address terms, kinship terms, and pronouns which often display clear affective dimensions ( ranging from the complex address-form systems found languages such a Javanese to inversions of vocative kin terms found in Rural Italy ); lexical processes such as synecdoche and metonymy involved in affect meaning manipulation ; certain categories of meaning like evidentiality ; reduplication, quantifiers, and comparative structures ; as well as inflectional morphology.

Grammar and syntax are simple and positional ; that is, grammatical categories are indicated by the position of words in the sentence rather than by inflectional endings, prepositions, or the like ( e. g., in English “ John loves Mary ” is distinguished from “ Mary loves John ” by the position of the words in the sentences ).

These word classes have grammatical features ( also called categories or inflectional categories ), which can have one of a set of potential values ( also called the property, meaning, or feature of the category ).

In the latter, he discussed the inflectional categories of Indo-European languages and later, on the basis of these studies, formulated the so-called Case Theory.

Spanish and Portuguese, whose o / os / a / as inflections commonly mark both adjectives and nouns, shows a very permeable boundary as many roots straddle the lexical categories of adjective and noun ( with little or no inflectional difference ).

In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes, a limited but productive system of compounding, and a rich inflectional system.

Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for:

Normally the Latin or Greek inflectional ending is replaced with the Esperanto inflectional ending − o.

In the 19th and 20th centuries a few learned words and phrases were introduced using a more or less direct transliteration of Ancient Greek ( rather than the traditional Latin-based morphology and dropped inflectional endings ), e. g. nous ( νοῦς ), hoi polloi ( οἱ πολλοί ).

Though many English words derived from Greek through the literary route drop the inflectional endings ( tripod, zoology, pentagon ) or use Latin endings ( papyrus, mausoleum ), some preserve the Greek endings: tetrahedron, schema ( cf.

More recent projects include the lemmatization of the Greek corpus ( 2006 )-- a substantial undertaking, given the highly inflectional nature of the Greek language and the complexity of the corpus, covering more than two millennia of literary development -- and the Online LSJ ( released in February 2011 ).

For example, the K ' iche ' language spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k-and x-to mark incompletive and completive aspect ; Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers-le 了 ,-zhe 着, zài-在, and-guò 过 to mark the perfective, durative stative, durative progressive, and experiential aspects, and also marks aspect with adverbs ; and English marks the continuous aspect with the verb to be coupled with present participle and the perfect with the verb to have coupled with past participle.

) The claim that na-adjectives are inflectional rests on the claim that the syllable da ' is ', usually regarded as a " copula verb ", is really a suffix — an inflection.

The order of these affixes is fixed, so we may view any given noun or verb as a stem followed by several inflectional slots, i. e. positions in which inflectional suffixes may occur.

Furthermore, he deprecated misconceptions about Aki being wholly influenced by Sanskrit, finding that Kawi did not use verb inflexion, thus differing from Sanskrit's highly developed inflectional system.

Besides their fairly consistent ergative alignment and their generally agglutinative morphology ( despite a number of not entirely predictable morpheme mergers ), Hurrian and Urartian are also both characterized by the use of suffixes in their derivational and inflectional morphology ( including ten to fifteen grammatical cases ) and postpositions in syntax ; both are considered to have the default order subject – object – verb, although there is significant variation, especially in Urartian.

At least one study has sought to analyze the category of negative informal contractions as the attachment of an inflectional suffix, for example, due to the existence of irregular forms and the fact that " n't " moves with the verb during inversion for questions rather than staying in the same place as the full word " not " would.

Dictionaries may also have cognitive functions such as help users to develop knowledge in general or about a specific topic, such as the birthday of a famous person and the inflectional paradigm of a specific verb.

Note the okurigana are not considered part of the reading ; grammatically the verb is kudasa-ru ( verb stem + inflectional suffix ), but orthographically the stem itself is analyzed as kuda-sa ( kanji reading + okurigana ).

Thus its inflectional paradigm is a combination: most of it derives from ( to be ) but the present subjunctive appears to come from ( to sit ) via the Old Spanish verb seer.

For another example, the root of the English verb form destabilized is stabil -, a form of stable that does not occur alone ; the stem is de · stabil · ize, which includes the derivational affixes de-and-ize, but not the inflectional past tense suffix -( e ) d. That is, a stem is that part of a word that inflectional affixes attach to.

Since English lacks inflectional morphology to a large extent, the finite and non-finite forms of a given verb are often identical.

In languages like English that have little inflectional morphology, the finite and infinitive or participle forms of a given verb are often identical, e. g.

By contrast, the languages of Tanzania have large numbers of inflectional suffixes.

A lexeme belongs to a particular syntactic category, has a certain meaning ( semantic value ), and in inflecting languages, has a corresponding inflectional paradigm ; that is, a lexeme in many languages will have many different forms.

According to this typology, some languages are isolating, and have little to no morphology ; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have lots of easily separable morphemes ; while others yet are inflectional or fusional, because their inflectional morphemes are " fused " together.

* Others ( see overview in ) have demonstrated creoles that serve as counterexamples to McWhorter's hypothesis — the existence of inflectional morphology in Berbice Dutch Creole, for example, or tone in Papiamentu.

When these words have inflectional endings ( verbs / adjectives and adverbs ), the end of the stem is written phonetically:

Classical Japanese had some auxiliary verbs ( i. e., they were independent words ) which have become grammaticized in modern Japanese as inflectional suffixes, such as the past tense suffix-ta ( which might have developed as a contraction of-te ari ).

Uehara ( 1998 ) observes that Japanese grammarians have disagreed as to the criteria that make some words " inflectional ", katsuyō, and others not, in particular, the 形容動詞 keiyōdōshi – " na-adjectives " or " na-nominals.

In sentence ( 1 ) above, the content words have been changed into nonsense syllables but it is not difficult for one to posit that winfy is an adjective, prunkilmonger, glidgement, levensers as nouns, mominkled, brangified as verbs and vederously as an adverb based on clues like the derivational and inflectional morphemes.

Accent alternations are very frequent in inflectional paradigms, both by quality and placement in the word ( the so-called " mobile paradigms ", which were present in the PIE itself but in Proto-Balto-Slavic have become much more widespread ).

Thus the Sudanic languages of East Africa and adjacent Afro-Asiatic families are part of the same area with inflectional past-marking that extends into Europe, whereas more westerly Nilo-Saharan languages often do not have past tense.

Baronh is an inflectional or synthetic language: affixes are attached to a fixed stem to express verbal aspect and mode, and case in nouns and pronouns, Nouns and pronouns have seven cases which affixes were derived from particles in the Japanese language.

While creoles tend to have drastically simplified morphologies, mixed languages often retain the inflectional complexities of both parent languages.

Zwicky and Pullum have shown that n't is an inflectional suffix, not a clitic or a derivational suffix.