Inflections
are a special type of suffix . They are added to the end of a word
to indicate a grammatical property. For instance, the -s
inflection is added to a noun to indicate plural number (tree/trees).
Inflections differ from other suffixes in one important respect. The suffix -ment, for example, added to the verb embarrass creates a
completely different word, the noun embarrassment. Adding an inflection, however, does not create a new word, but a different grammatical form of the same word. For example, the words tree and trees are two forms of the same lexical word tree. In a dictionary, they would both appear under tree.
They differ only in number: tree is singular and trees is plural.
In comparison with other languages, English has very few inflections. They are always suffixes, that is, they are always added to the end of aword. The inflections are shown in Table 3.
Inflections
Table 3
Inflections
Inflection Examples
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Nouns Plural number -s trees
Genitive -’s John’s car
-’ the boys’ school
Main Verbs -s form (3rd
person singular) -s walks
past form -ed walked
-ed form -ed walked
-ing form -ing walking
Adjectives Comparative -er older, sooner
and adverbs
Superlative -est oldest, soonest
are a special type of suffix . They are added to the end of a word
to indicate a grammatical property. For instance, the -s
inflection is added to a noun to indicate plural number (tree/trees).
Inflections differ from other suffixes in one important respect. The suffix -ment, for example, added to the verb embarrass creates a
completely different word, the noun embarrassment. Adding an inflection, however, does not create a new word, but a different grammatical form of the same word. For example, the words tree and trees are two forms of the same lexical word tree. In a dictionary, they would both appear under tree.
They differ only in number: tree is singular and trees is plural.
In comparison with other languages, English has very few inflections. They are always suffixes, that is, they are always added to the end of aword. The inflections are shown in Table 3.
Inflections
Table 3
Inflections
Inflection Examples
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Nouns Plural number -s trees
Genitive -’s John’s car
-’ the boys’ school
Main Verbs -s form (3rd
person singular) -s walks
past form -ed walked
-ed form -ed walked
-ing form -ing walking
Adjectives Comparative -er older, sooner
and adverbs
Superlative -est oldest, soonest
