Inflection of the Portuguese or Spanish lexeme for "cat". Blue represents the masculine gender, pink represents the feminine gender, grey represents the form used for mixed-gender, and green represents the plural number; the singular is unmarked.

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case. Conjugation is the inflection of verbs; declension is the inflection of nouns, adjectives and pronouns.

An inflection expresses one or more grammatical categories with an explicitly stated prefix, suffix, or infix, or another internal modification such as a vowel change.^[1] For example, the Latin ducam, meaning "I will lead", includes an explicit suffix, -am, expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense (future). The use of this suffix is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word "lead" is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense; it is simply the bare form of a verb.

The inflected form of a word often contains both a free morpheme (a unit of meaning which can stand by itself as a word), and a bound morpheme (a unit of meaning which cannot stand alone as a word). For example, the English word "cars" is a noun that is inflected for number, specifically to express the plural; the content morpheme "car" is unbound because it could stand alone as a word, while the suffix "s" is bound because it cannot stand alone as a word. These two morphemes together form the inflected word "cars".

Words that are never subjected to inflection are said to be invariant; for example, "must" is an invariant item: it never takes a suffix or changes form to signify a different grammatical category. Its category can only be determined by its context.

Requiring the inflections of more than one word in a sentence to be compatible according to the rules of the language is known as concord or agreement. For example, in "the choir sings", "choir" is a singular noun, so "sing" is constrained in the present tense to use the third person singular suffix "s".

Languages that have some degree of inflection are synthetic languages. These can be highly inflected, such as Latin, or weakly inflected, such as English. Languages that are so inflected that a sentence can consist of a single highly inflected word (such as many American Indian languages) are called polysynthetic languages. Languages in which each inflection conveys only a single grammatical category, such as Finnish, are known as agglutinative languages, while languages in which a single inflection can convey multiple grammatical roles (such as both nominative case and plural, as in Latin and German) are called fusional. Languages such as Mandarin Chinese that never use inflections are called analytic or isolating.

Examples in English[link]

In English most nouns are inflected for number with the inflectional plural affix -s (as in "dog" → "dog-s"), and most English verbs are inflected for tense with the inflectional past tense affix -ed (as in "call" → "call-ed"). English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the third person singular in the present tense (with -s), and the present participle (with -ing). English short adjectives are inflected to mark comparative and superlative forms (with -er and -est respectively). In addition, English also shows inflection by ablaut (sound change, mostly in verbs) and umlaut (a particular type of sound change, mostly in nouns), as well as long-short vowel alternation. For example:

• Write, wrote, written (marking by ablaut variation, and also suffixing in the participle)
• Sing, sang, sung (ablaut)
• Foot, feet (marking by umlaut variation)
• Mouse, mice (umlaut)
• Child, children (ablaut, and also suffixing in the plural)

Declension and conjugation[link]

Two traditional grammatical terms refer to inflections of specific word classes:

• Inflecting a noun, pronoun, adjective or determiner is known as declining it. The affixes may express number, case, or gender.
• Inflecting a verb is called conjugating it. The affixes may express tense, mood, voice, or aspect.

An organized list of the inflected forms of a given lexeme is also called its declension, or conjugation, as the case may be.

Below is the declension of the English pronoun I, which is inflected for case and number.

The pronoun who is also inflected in formal English according to case. Its declension is defective, in the sense that it lacks a reflexive form.

The following table shows the conjugation of the verb to arrive in the indicative mood. It is inflected for person, number, and tense by suffixation.

The non-finite forms arrive (bare infinitive), arrived (past participle) and arriving (gerund/present participle), although not inflected for person or number, can also be regarded as part of the conjugation of the verb to arrive. Compound verb forms such as I have arrived, I had arrived, or I will arrive can be included also in the conjugation of this verb for didactical purposes, but are not overt conjugations of arrive. The formula for deriving the covert form, in which the relevant inflections do not occur in the main verb, is

pronoun + conjugated auxiliary verb + non-finite form of main verb.

Inflectional paradigm[link]

A class of words with similar inflection rules is called an inflectional paradigm. Typically the similar rules amount to a unique set of affixes. Nominal inflectional paradigms are also called declensions, and verbal inflectional paradigms are also called conjugations. For example, in Old English nouns could be divided into two major declensions, the strong and the weak, inflected as is shown below:

The terms "strong declension" and "weak declension" are primarily relevant to well-known dependent-marking languages^{[citation needed]} (such as the Indo-European languages,^{[citation needed]} or Japanese). In dependent-marking languages, nouns in adpositional phrases can carry inflectional morphemes. (Adpositions include prepositions and postpositions.) In head-marking languages, the adpositions can carry the inflection in adpositional phrases. This means that these languages will have inflected adpositions. In Western Apache (San Carlos dialect), the postposition -ká’ 'on' is inflected for person and number with prefixes.

Traditional grammars have specific terms for inflections of nouns and verbs, but not for those of adpositions.^{[clarification needed]}

Inflection vs. derivation[link]

Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes (smallest units of meaning) to a word, which indicate grammatical information (for example, case, number, person, gender or voice, mood, tense, or aspect). Derivation is the process of adding derivational morphemes, which create a new word from existing words, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (for example, changing a noun to a verb).^[2]

Words generally are not listed in dictionaries (in which case they would be lexical items) on the basis of their inflectional morphemes. But they often are listed on the basis of their derivational morphemes. For instance, English dictionaries list readable and readability, words with derivational suffixes, along with their root read. However, no traditional English dictionary lists book as one entry and books as a separate entry nor do they list jump and jumped as two different entries.

Inflectional morphology[link]

Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called inflectional languages, which is a synonym for inflected languages. Morphemes may be added in several different ways:

• Affixation, or simply adding morphemes onto the word without changing the root,
• Reduplication, doubling all or part of a word to change its meaning,
• Alternation, exchanging one sound for another in the root (usually vowel sounds, as in the ablaut process found in Germanic strong verbs and the umlaut often found in nouns, among others).
• Suprasegmental variations, such as of stress, pitch or tone, where no sounds are added or changed but the intonation and relative strength of each sound is altered regularly. For an example, see Initial-stress-derived noun.

Affixing includes prefixing (adding before the base), and suffixing (adding after the base), as well as the much less common infixing (inside) and circumfixing (a combination of prefix and suffix).

Inflection is most typically realized by adding an inflectional morpheme (that is, affixation) to the base form (either the root or a stem).

Inflection in various languages[link]

Indo-European languages (fusional)[link]

All Indo-European languages, such as Albanian, English, German, Russian, Persian, Kurdish (kurdî), Italian, Spanish, French, Sanskrit, Marathi, Bengali and Hindi are inflected to a greater or lesser extent. In general, older Indo-European languages such as Latin, Greek, Old English, Old Norse, and Sanskrit are extensively inflected. Deflexion has caused modern versions of some languages that were previously highly inflected to be much less so; an excellent example is Modern English, as compared to Old English. Most Slavic languages are an exception to the general Indo-European deflexion trend, continuing to be highly inflected (in some cases acquiring additional inflectional complexity and grammatical genders, as in Czech).

English[link]

Old English was a moderately inflected language, using an extensive case system similar to that of modern Icelandic or German. Middle and Modern English lost progressively more of the Old English inflectional system. Modern English is considered a weakly inflected language, since its nouns have only vestiges of inflection (plurals, the pronouns), and its regular verbs have only four forms: an inflected form for the past indicative and subjunctive (looked), an inflected form for the third-person-singular present indicative (looks), an inflected form for the present participle (looking), and an uninflected form for everything else (look). While the English possessive indicator 's (as in "Jane's book") is a remnant of the Old English genitive case suffix, it is now considered not a suffix but a clitic.

Other Germanic languages[link]

Old Norse was inflected, but modern Swedish, Norwegian and Danish have, like English, lost almost all overt inflection. Icelandic preserves almost all of the inflections of Old Norse and has added its own. Modern German remains moderately inflected, retaining four noun cases, although the genitive started falling into disuse in all but formal writing in Early New High German. The case system of Dutch, simpler than that of German, is also simplified in common usage. Afrikaans, recognized as a distinct language in its own right rather than a Dutch dialect only in the early 20th century, has lost almost all inflection.

Latin and the Romance languages[link]

The Romance languages, such as Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian, have more overt inflection than English, especially in verb conjugation. Adjectives, nouns and articles are considerably less inflected than verbs, but they still have different forms according to number and grammatical gender.

Latin, the mother tongue of the Romance languages, was highly inflected; nouns and adjectives had different forms according to seven grammatical cases (including five major ones) with five major patterns of declension, and three genders instead of the two found in most Romance tongues. There were four patterns of conjugation in six tenses, three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, plus the infinitive, participle, gerund, gerundive, and supine) and two voices (passive and active), all overtly expressed by affixes (passive voice forms were periphrastic in three tenses).

Baltic languages[link]

The Baltic languages are highly inflected. Nouns and adjectives are declined in up to seven overt cases. Additional cases are defined in various covert ways. For example, an inessive case, an illative case, an adessive case and allative case are borrowed from Finnic. Latvian has only one overt locative case but it syncretizes the above four cases to the locative marking them by differences in the use of prepositions.^[3] Lithuanian breaks them out of the genitive case, accusative case and locative case by using different postpositions.^[4]

Modern Baltic languages have also retained the old dual number. However, it is nowadays considered obsolete. For instance, in standard Lithuanian it is normal to say "dvi varnos (plural) – two crows" instead of "dvi varni (dual)". Adjectives, pronouns, and numerals are declined for number, gender, and case to agree with the noun they modify or for which they substitute. Baltic verbs are inflected for tense, mood, aspect, and voice. They agree with the subject in person and number (not in all forms in modern Latvian).

Slavic languages[link]

All Slavic languages make use of a high degree of inflection, typically having six or seven cases and three genders for nouns and adjectives. However, the overt case system has disappeared almost completely in modern Bulgarian and Macedonian. Most verb tenses and moods are also formed by inflection (however, some are periphrastic, typically future and conditional). Inflection is also present in adjective comparation and word derivation.

Declensional endings depend on case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, instrumental, vocative), number (singular, dual or plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and animacy (animate vs inanimate). Unusual in other language families, declension in most Slavic languages also depends on whether the word is a noun or an adjective. Slovene and Sorbian languages use a rare third number, (in addition to singular and plural numbers) known as dual (in case of some words dual survived also in Polish and other Slavic languages). In addition, in some Slavic languages, such as Polish, word stems are frequently modified by the addition or absence of endings, resulting in consonant and vowel alternation.

Arabic (fusional)[link]

Modern Standard Arabic (also called Literary Arabic) is a highly inflected language. It uses a complex system of pronouns and their respective prefixes and suffixes for verb, noun, adjective and possessive conjugation. In addition, the system known as ʾIʿrāb places vowel suffixes on each verb, noun, adjective, and adverb, according to its function within a sentence and its relation to surrounding words.^[5]

The following table is an example of present-tense case applications in Arabic:

* note: a long tatwiil ( ـــــــــــــــــــــ ) indicates where the verb stem would be placed in order to conjugate it.

Arabic regional dialects (e.g. Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Gulf Arabic), used for everyday communication, tend to have less inflection than the more formal Literary Arabic. For example, in Jordanian Arabic, the second- and third-person feminine plurals (أنتنّ /antunna/ and هنّ /hunna/) and their respective unique conjugations are lost and replaced by the masculine (أنتم /antum/ and هم /hum/), whereas in Lebanese and Syrian Arabic, هم /hum/ is replaced by هنّ /hunna/.

Uralic languages (agglutinative)[link]

The Uralic languages are agglutinative, following from the agglutination in Proto-Uralic. The largest languages are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian—all European Union official languages. Uralic inflection is, or is developed from, affixing. Grammatical markers directly added to the word perform the same function as prepositions in English. Almost all words are inflected according to their roles in the sentence: verbs, nouns, pronouns, numerals, adjectives, and some particles.

Hungarian and Finnish, in particular, often simply concatenate suffixes. For example, Finnish talossanikinko "in my house, too?" consists of talo-ssa-ni-kin-ko. However, in the Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Sami), there are processes which affect the root, particularly consonant gradation. The original suffixes may disappear (and appear only by liaison), leaving behind the modification of the root. This process is extensively developed in Estonian and Sami, and makes them also inflected, not only agglutinating languages. The Estonian illative case, for example, is expressed by a modified root: maja →majja (historical form *majam).

Altaic languages (agglutinative)[link]

The three language families often united as Altaic languages—Turkic, Mongolic, and Manchu-Tungus—are agglutinative. The largest languages are Turkish, Azerbaijani and Uzbek—all Turkic languages. Altaic inflection is, or is developed from, affixing. Grammatical markers directly added to the word perform the same function as prepositions in English. Almost all words are inflected according to their roles in the sentence: verbs, nouns, pronouns, numerals, adjectives, and some particles.

Basque (agglutinative)[link]

Basque, a language isolate, is an extremely inflected language, heavily inflecting both nouns and verbs. A Basque noun is inflected in 17 different ways for case, multiplied by 4 ways for its definiteness and number. These first 68 forms are further modified based on other parts of the sentence, which in turn are inflected for the noun again. It is estimated that at two levels of recursion, a Basque noun may have 458,683 inflected forms.^[6] Verb forms are similarly complex, agreeing with the subject, the direct object and several other arguments.

Sino-Tibetan languages (isolating)[link]

Some of the major Eastern Asian languages (such as the various Chinese languages, Vietnamese, and Thai) are not overtly inflected, or show very little overt inflection, so they are considered analytic languages (also known as isolating languages).

Chinese[link]

The Chinese family of languages, in general, does not possess overt inflectional morphology. Chinese words generally comprise one or two monosyllabic written characters, each of which can also stand alone as an unbound morpheme. Since morphemes are monosyllabic in the Chinese languages,^[7] Chinese is quite resistant to inflectional changes; instead, Chinese uses lexical means for achieving covert inflectional transparency.

While European languages more often use overt inflection to mark a word's function in a sentence, the Chinese languages tend to use word order as a grammatical marking system. Whereas in English the first-person singular nominative "I" changes to "me" when used in the accusative – that is, as the object of a verb – Chinese simply uses word order to mark such a distinction. An example from Mandarin: 我给了他一本书 (wǒ gěile tā yī běn shū) 'I gave him a book'. Here 我 (wǒ) means 'I' and 他 (tā) means 'him'. However, 'He gave me a book' would be: 他给了我一本书 (tā gěile wǒ yī běn shū). 我 (Wǒ) and 他 (Tā) simply change places in the sentence to indicate that their case has switched: there is no overt inflection in the form of the words. In classical Chinese, pronouns were overtly inflected as to case. However, these overt case forms are no longer used; most of the alternative pronouns are considered archaic in modern Mandarin Chinese. Classically, 我 (wǒ) was used solely as the first person accusative. 吾 (Wú) was generally used as the first person nominative.^[8]

Japanese (isolating/agglutinative)[link]

Japanese shows a high degree of overt inflection of verbs, less so of adjectives, and very little of nouns, but it is mostly strictly agglutinative and extremely regular. Some fusion of morphemes does take place (e.g. causative-passive -sare- as in ikasareru "is made to go", and non-past progressive -ter- as in tabeteru "is eating"), but this is rare. Formally, every noun phrase must be marked for case, but this is done by invariable particles (clitic postpositions). (Many grammarians consider Japanese particles to be separate words, and therefore not an inflection, while others consider agglutination a type of overt inflection, and therefore consider Japanese nouns as overtly inflected.)

Auxiliary languages[link]

Auxiliary languages, such as Esperanto, Ido, and Interlingua have comparatively simple inflectional systems.

Esperanto[link]

In Esperanto, an agglutinative language, nouns and adjectives are inflected for case (nominative, accusative) and number (singular, plural), according to a simple paradigm without irregularities. Verbs are not inflected for person or number, but they are inflected for tense (past, present, future) and mood (indicative, infinitive, conditional, jussive). They also form active and passive participles, which may be past, present or future. All verbs are regular.

Ido[link]

Ido has a different form for each verbal tense (past, present, future, volitive and imperative) plus an infinitive, and both a present and past participle. There are though no verbal inflections for person or number, and all verbs are regular.

Nouns are marked for number (singular and plural), and the accusative case may be shown in certain situations, typically when the direct object of a sentence precedes its verb. On the other hand, adjectives are unmarked for gender, number or case (unless they stand on their own, without a noun, in which case they take on the same desinences as the missing noun would have taken). The definite article "la" ("the") remains unaltered regardless of gender or case, and also of number, except when there is no other word to show plurality. Pronouns are identical in all cases, though exceptionally the accusative case may be marked, as for nouns.

Interlingua[link]

Interlingua, in contrast with the Romance languages, has no irregular verb conjugations, and its verb forms are the same for all persons and numbers. It does, however, have compound verb tenses similar to those in the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages: ille ha vivite, "he has lived"; illa habeva vivite, "she had lived". Nouns are inflected by number, taking a plural -s, but rarely by gender: only when referring to a male or female being. Interlingua has no noun-adjective agreement by gender, number, or case. As a result, adjectives ordinarily have no inflections. They may take the plural form if they are being used in place of a noun: le povres, "the poor".

Notes[link]

See also[link]

• Agreement (linguistics)
• Diction
• Intonation (linguistics)
• Introflection
• Lexeme
• Marker (linguistics)
• Morpheme
• Nominal TAM
• Periphrasis
• Suppletion
• Synthetic language
• Tense–aspect–mood
• Uninflected word
• Weak suppletion

References[link]

• Agirre, E.; et al. (1992), "XUXEN: A spelling checker/corrector for Basque based on two-level morphology", Proceedings of the Third Conference of Applied Natural Language Processing, pp. 119–125, http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/A/A92/A92-1016.pdf 
• Bubeník, Vit. (1999). An introduction to the study of morphology. LINCON coursebooks in linguistics, 07. Muenchen: LINCOM Europa. ISBN 3-89586-570-2. 
• Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29653-6 (pbk). 

Recommended reading[link]

• Bauer, Laurie (2003). Introducing linguistic morphology (2nd ed.). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. ISBN 0-87840-343-4. 
• Haspelmath, Martin (2002). Understanding morphology. London: Arnold, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0340760257 (hb); ISBN 0-340-76206-5 (pbk). 
• Katamba, Francis (1993). Morphology. Modern linguistics series. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-10101-5 (hb); ISBN 0-312-10356-5 (pbk). 
• Matthews, Peter (1991). Morphology (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-41043-6 (hb); ISBN 0-521-42256-6 (pbk). 
• Nichols, Johanna (1986). "Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar". Language 62 (1): 56–119. 
• De Reuse, Willem J. (1996). A practical grammar of the San Carlos Apache language. LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics 51. LINCOM. ISBN 3-89586-861-2. 
• Spencer, Andrew; Zwicky, Arnold M., eds. (1998). The handbook of morphology. Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-18544-5. 
• Stump, Gregory T. (2001). Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure. Cambridge studies in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-78047-0. 
• Van Valin, Robert D., Jr. (2001). An introduction to syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-63566-7 (pbk); ISBN 0-521-63199-8 (hb). 

External links[link]

Look up inflection in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

SIL articles[link]

• SIL: What is inflection?
• SIL: What is an inflectional affix?
• SIL: What is an inflectional category?
• SIL: What is a morphological process?
• SIL: What is derivation?
• SIL: Comparison of inflection and derivation

• SIL: What is an agglutinative language?

• SIL: What is a fusional language?
• SIL: What is an isolating language?
• SIL: What is a polysynthetic language?

Lexicon of Linguistics articles[link]

• Lexicon of Linguistics: Agglutinating Language, Fusional Morphology, Isolating Language, Polysynthetic Language
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Inflection, Derivation
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Conjugation, Declension
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Base, Stem, Root
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Defective Paradigm
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Strong Verb
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Inflection Phrase (IP), INFL, AGR, Tense
• Lexicon of Linguistics: Lexicalist Hypothesis

Ben Westbeech is a male DJ, singer and producer originating from Bristol, but who now lives in London, UK. Trained as cellist and vocalist, his influences include house, soul, jazz and hip hop.

Beginning career (2007–2008)[link]

Ben gave a CD containing his first single "So Good Today" to a friend in London. Two months later she played it to Gilles Peterson who snapped it up. This led to Ben being signed to Gilles Peterson's new label, Brownswood Recordings. His debut album Welcome to the Best Years of Your Life was released in March 2007.

He later appeared on Later... with Jools Holland alongside Paul McCartney and Björk. He also appeared on the track "Squeeze Me" on Kraak & Smaak's album titled Plastic People, released in April 2008.

[edit] There's More To Life Than This (2009–2011)

More recently, he appeared on the track "I Can See", which was the main single for Jazzanova's album titled Of All The Things", released in January 2009 on Verve/Universal. Ben also sang on the song "Shame" for DJ Marky & Artificial Intelligence. Currently Ben is working with Professor Green (producing for his new record), Kutz (Soul Jazz), Redlight (Lobster Boy) and Rusko (Mad Decent).

Then, in 2009, widely respected house label Strictly Rhythm approached Ben and suggested he record something for them. Reinvigorated by the fresh challenge, he began work on what, a few months down the line, has developed in to his second album, There's More To Life Than This. The record features an impressive roll call of collaborators – including Soul Clap, Henrik Schwarz, MJ Cole, Motor City Drum Ensemble and Georg Levin – and Ben describes it as "house inspired, rather than straight up house music". "Falling" will be released on 1 March with remixes from The 2 Bears, Deetron, and Dark Sky. Ben's album, There's More To Life Than This, is due out September 12, 2011.

Ben also produces and DJs under the moniker Breach.

He produced the track "Fatherless" released on PTN which became an anthem of 2011 and was played by almost everyone from techno DJs to dubstep DJs, and was ranked 13th in resident advisers tracks of the year. on Pattern as of 2011.^[1]

Breach has also released on Dirty Bird (CLaude Vonstrokes label) and Pet's (Catz n Dogz label). And also has releases planned on Lobster Boy (Redlight's label).

Discography[link]

Singles[link]

• "Get Closer" (12")
• "So Good Today" (12")
• "So Good Today" (Domu Remixes) (12", Promo)
• "So Good Today" (Osunlade Remixes) (12")
• "So Good Today"/"Beauty" (12")
• "Dance With Me" (MJ Cole / Switch Remixes) (12")
• "Hang Around" (Remixes) (12")
• "Hang Around"/"Pusherman" (7", W/Lbl)
• "Something For The Weekend"
• "Falling" (Strictly Rhythm)

Albums[link]

2007: Welcome To The Best Years Of Your Life

• 1 "Welcome" (3:39)
• 2 "So Good Today" (2:59)
• 3 "Get Silly" (3:51)
• 4 "Bright Future" (3:52)
• 5 "Nothing Else" (2:44)
• 6 "Gotta Keep On" (2:56)
• 7 "Taken Away From" (2:49)
• 8 "Grey Skies" (1:49)
• 9 "Stop What You're Doing" (2:49)
• 10 "Dance With Me" (4:02)
• 11 "Get Closer" (4:55)
• 12 "Hang Around" (3:38)
• 13 "Pusherman" (3:16)
• 14 "In/Out" (2:44)
• 15 "Beauty" (4:35)

2011: There's More To Life Than This

• 1. "The Book" (produced by Georg Levin)
• 2. "Something For The Weekend" (produced by Danny J Lewis)
• 3. "Falling" (produced by Lovebirds)
• 4. "Same Thing" (produced by Chocolate Puma)
• 5. "Justice" (produced by Motor City Drum Ensemble)
• 6. "Stronger" (produced by Midland)
• 7. "Inflections" (produced by Henrik Schwarz)
• 8. "Sugar" (produced by Redlight)
• 9. "Let Your Feelings Show" (produced by Georg Levin)
• 10. "Butterflies" (produced by Rasmus Faber)
• 11. "Summer's Loss" (produced by Rasmus Faber)

Samples[link]

• Get Silly samples Ray Barretto's cover of Stevie Wonder's song Pastime Paradise
• Stop What You're Doing samples Dionne Warwick's Wives And Lovers
• Get Closer samples Linda Williams' Elevate Your Mind
• Pusherman samples Lover’s Theme by Bob Cunningham

References[link]

External links[link]

• Ben Westbeech on Discogs
• Basic Soul interview
• Myspace Profile
• Brownswood Recordings
• Mixtape review
• Liberation Frequency interview
• [2]

1. REDIRECT Max Graham

This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (September 2009)

Not to be confused with Tom Newman

Thomas Newman
Newman at Classic Brit Awards in 2010
Background information
Birth name	Thomas Montgomery Newman
Born	(1955-10-20) October 20, 1955 (age 56)
Origin	Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupations	Composer
Website	IMDb

Thomas Montgomery Newman (born October 20, 1955) is an American composer and conductor, best known for his many film scores.

Newman has received a total of ten Academy Award nominations, although as of 2011, he has yet to win the award. He has however won a BAFTA, two Grammys and an Emmy, and has been nominated for a Golden Globe. Newman was honored with the Richard Kirk award at the 2000 BMI Film and TV Awards. The award is given annually to a composer who has made significant contributions to film and television music.^[1]

Early life[link]

Born in Los Angeles, California, he was the youngest son of Mississippi-born Martha Louise (née Montgomery) and composer Alfred Newman. He is a member of a film-scoring dynasty in Hollywood that includes his father, brother David Newman, sister Maria Newman, uncles Lionel Newman and Emil Newman, cousin Randy Newman (who is also known as a singer and songwriter) and his nephew Joey Newman. Newman was educated at Yale University before starting his career in music.

Film scoring career[link]

His first major score was for the 1984 film Reckless. In 1999, Newman composed the score to Sam Mendes' first feature film American Beauty, created using mainly percussion instruments. Newman believed the score helped move the film along without disturbing the "moral ambiguity" of the script, saying "It was a real delicate balancing act in terms of what music worked to preserve that." This was his first collaboration with Mendes, and he would go on to score all of the director's subsequent films except for Away We Go. He received a fourth Oscar nomination for this score, and although he lost again (to John Corigliano for The Red Violin), he did receive a Grammy and a BAFTA.

His critical and commercial success has continued in recent years with his scores for films such as The Green Mile, Erin Brockovich, In the Bedroom, and The Salton Sea. He was nominated consecutively for a further three Academy Awards, for Road to Perdition (2002), Finding Nemo (2003), and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004). However, he lost on each occasion, to Elliot Goldenthal (for Frida), Howard Shore (for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King), and Jan A. P. Kaczmarek (for Finding Neverland) respectively.

He was again nominated for an Oscar for scoring Steven Soderbergh's The Good German (2006). At the Oscar ceremony, he appeared in the opening segment by Errol Morris, who jokingly stated that Newman had been nominated for and failed to win an Oscar eight times. Newman replied: "No, I've failed seven but this will be my eighth", and indeed, he again lost, this time to Gustavo Santaolalla for Babel.

His first score since The Good German was for the 2008 animated film WALL-E, collaborating for the second time with director Andrew Stanton (with the first collaboration being Finding Nemo). The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (as had "Nemo"). Newman received two Oscar nominations: one for Best Original Score, and another for Best Original Song for "Down to Earth", which he co-wrote with Peter Gabriel. He was nominated in the Original Score category with two other veteran composers, James Newton-Howard and Danny Elfman, both of whom have also been nominated for several Oscars but each time unsuccessfully. Newman lost both the score and song nominations to A R Rahman for his work on Slumdog Millionaire. He and Peter Gabriel did however win a Grammy for "Down to Earth".

In 2008 Newman scored Towelhead and Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road and in 2009 he scored Brothers. Newman's scores of 2011 include The Help, The Debt, and The Adjustment Bureau.

Newman is to score the 23rd James Bond movie Skyfall, directed by his long time collaborator Sam Mendes, which celebrates the film franchise's 50th anniversary.^[2]

Film compositions[link]

Additional soundtracks[link]

• 2005: Madagascar (from American Beauty)
• 2007: Sicko (from Little Children, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and In the Bedroom)
• 2010: Alice in Wonderland (Teaser Trailer) (from Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events)

Newman has composed music for television as well, including theme music for the series Boston Public and the miniseries Angels in America. His theme music for the television show Six Feet Under won two Grammy Awards in 2003, for Best Instrumental Composition as well as Best Instrumental Arrangement. Newman also wrote a commissioned concert work for orchestra, Reach Forth Our Hands, for the 1996 Cleveland Bicentennial. The Los Angeles Philharmonic has commissioned a new work by Newman to be performed by the Kronos Quartet and Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, during the orchestra's 2009-2010 season.

Newman is also responsible for the Coles Supermarket Jingle in the 2010 line of advertisements.^{[citation needed]}

Awards & nominations[link]

Newman has received a total of ten Academy Award nominations, however as of 2012 he has yet to win the award, making him the most nominated living composer to have never won an Oscar, and behind Alex North, who received 14 unsuccessful nominations. Nine of his nominations are in the Best Original Score category, while one is for Best Original Song.

His first major success's for which he was recognised, came in 1994, when he earned two Academy Award nominations for his scores to Little Women and The Shawshank Redemption; he was the only double-nominee that year, although he lost to Hans Zimmer for The Lion King.

He received his third Academy Award nomination in 1996 for the score to Diane Keaton's comedy Unstrung Heroes, but again lost, this time to Alan Menken for Pocahontas.

He has also received one Golden Globe nomination for 1999's American Beauty, but did not win, as well as six Grammy nominations and two wins.

American Film Institute[link]

Newman's scores for American Beauty and The Shawshank Redemption were nominated for AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Thomas Newman Complete
• Thomas Newman at Filmreference.com
• Thomas Newman at the Internet Movie Database
• Thomas Newman at Soundtrackguide.net