The inflectional categories of the Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history, though with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression.

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.

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 ).

This is because words in Semitic languages are formed from a root consisting of ( usually ) three consonants, the vowels being used to indicate inflectional or derived forms.

So this ‘- es ’ is an inflectional marker and is used to match with its subject.

They are used even when the inflection of the stem can be determined by a following inflectional suffix, so the primary function of okurigana for many kanji is that of a phonetic complement.

However, sometimes the term " root " is also used to describe the word minus its inflectional endings, but with its lexical endings in place.

The suffixes used in Turkish fall roughly into two classes: constructive suffixes ( yapım ekleri ) and inflectional suffixes ( çekim ekleri ).

An inflectional suffix indicates how a word is used in a sentence.

A lemma is a group of lexemes generated by inflectional morphology.

Rules of the first kind are called inflectional rules, while those of the second kind are called word formation.

The English plural, as illustrated by dog and dogs, is an inflectional rule ; compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher provide an example of a word formation rule.

In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that-s is an inflectional morpheme.

An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word form ; a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem ; a compounding rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem.

Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms, or to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms.

Languages may be classified as synthetic or analytic in their word formation, depending on the preferred way of expressing notions that are not inflectional: either by using word formation ( synthetic ), or by using syntactic phrases ( analytic ).

English has fairly simple morphology, especially inflectional morphology, and thus it is often possible to ignore this task entirely and simply model all possible forms of a word ( e. g. " open, opens, opened, opening ") as separate words.

It is not usually possible to tell from the form of a word which class it belongs to ( except, to some extent, in the case of words with inflectional endings or derivational suffixes ).

This includes inflectional affixes for nouns and verbs which are still productive with borrowed vocabulary, the shift to VO word order, and the adoption of a preposed definite article.

* Word stem, the base part of a word not including 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 ).

For example, a creole language may lack significant inflectional morphology, lack tone on monosyllabic words, or lack semantically opaque word formation, even if these features are found in all of the parent languages of the languages from which the creole was formed.

No single word is attested in all its inflectional forms.

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.

Under a different and apparently more common view, this is the definition of a root, while a stem consists of the root plus optional derivational affixes, meaning that it is the part of a word to which inflectional affixes are added.

Thus, in this usage, the English word friendships contains the stem friend, to which the derivational suffix-ship is attached to form a new stem friendship, to which the inflectional suffix-s is attached.

Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for:

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.

In order to assign such an instance of to one of the phonemes and, it is necessary to consider morphological factors ( such as which of the vowels occurs in other forms of the words, or which inflectional pattern is followed ).

In most languages, vowels serve mainly to distinguish separate lexemes, rather than different inflectional forms of the same lexeme as they commonly do in the Semitic languages.

Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word-forms, or to generate word-forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms.

A list of all the inflected forms of a stem is called its inflectional paradigm.

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.