- published: 09 Jun 2011
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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. 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".