Inflectional morphology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Inflection morphology is a process in natural language processing.

To apply an inflection is to change the form of a word so as to give it extra meaning. This extra meaning could be:

• Number
• Person
• Case
• Gender
• Tense
• Mood
• Aspect
• Politeness (as in the Japanese language)

Inflectional morphology manifests primarily in the form of a prefix, suffix, or vowel change. A circumfix can also occur, but these are relatively rare.

An example of suffixes in inflectional morphology:

• "I have an apple" - apple singular
• "I have apples" - apples plural

The word apples differs from apple only in the sense that the former indicates more than one fruit. This distinction is mandatory in English, optional Korean, and impossible in Japanese. Yet other languages require the speaker to distinguish the number two of something, called the dual form of a noun.

An example of vowel changes in inflectional morphology:

• "I throw the pencil" - throw present tense
• "I threw the pencil" - threw past tense

Again, throw and threw are not different words. threw is the result of inflectional morphology being applied to the root word throw.

English is relatively poor in inflectional morphology. Other Indo-European languages have a richer system of inflection morphology. Latin is a typical example of a language with a very rich system of inflectional morphology.