Inflection

Revision as of 14:30, 30 January 2014

In grammar, inflection is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case. Conjugation is the inflection of verbs; declension is the inflection of nouns, adjectives and pronouns. Inflection is not to be confounded with derivation or agglutination.

Inflectional Paradigms and Inflectional Rules

In the UNL^arium framework, inflection is indicated by a set of transformations carried over the base form. This set of transformations can be represented by:

• inflectional paradigms, in case of regular behaviour (i.e., a set of transformations that is followed by several different words)
• inflectional rules, in case of irregular behaviour (i.e., a set of transformation that is followed by very few words); or
• inflectional paradigms and inflectional rules, in case of quasi-regular behaviour (i.e., when the word is mainly regular but has some inflectional particularities).

The difference between inflectional paradigms and inflectional rules is mainly a question of frequency. If a rule is applicable to several different words, it should be defined as a general inflectional paradigm; if it is applicable to a single word or to a very limited number of cases, it should be defined as an inflectional rule inside the very entry.

For instance, the plural of English nouns is considerably regular and can be treated, in most cases, by the general paradigm PLR:=0>"s"; (= add an "s" to the end of the word). This paradigm may be associated to a wide range of English words (such as table, book, boy, computer, etc). However, there are several special cases (such as man>men, child>children, foot>feet) that, being very limited, should be treated by inflectional rules instead of inflectional paradigms. The third case ("quasi-regular") is considerably rare in English, but may be found in French, for instance, where verbs such as acheter (= to buy) follows the conjugation of the second group in all cases but undergoes a small change in the root ("e" becomes "è") in some persons and tenses. To avoid the proliferation of paradigms, quasi-regular words are associated to general inflectional models, and only their corresponding exceptions are listed as inflectional rules.

Syntax

Inflectional paradigms and inflectional rules are expressed by A-rules, a special formalism for introducing prefixes, infixes and suffixes to the base form.

Inflections inside the dictionary

The UNL^arium framework brings two main dictionary formats:

• Generative, i.e., base forms and the corresponding lexical features and generation rules (to be used in natural language generation)
• Enumerative, i.e., word forms, with the corresponding lexical features (to be used in natural language analysis)

A sample of each format of the English dictionary is presented below:

generative

[foot] {2883} "100284665" (POS=NOU,LST=WRD,NUM=SNG,PAR=M1,INFR=FLX(PLR:="feet";)) <eng,0,0>;

enumerative

[foot] {2883} "100284665" (POS=NOU,LST=WRD,NUM=SNG,PAR=M1) <eng,0,0>;

[feet] {2883} "100284665" (POS=NOU,LST=WRD,NUM=PLR,PAR=M1) <eng,0,0>;

The enumerative dictionary includes all inflected forms as entries and, therefore, does not bring any inflectional rule except for the inflectional paradigm (PAR=M1). The generative dictionary, which brings only base forms as entries, includes the information on the inflectional paradigm and on inflectional rules.
Inflections are represented in the dictionary entry structure as follows:

• Inflectional paradigms are informed as PAR=Mxx, where "PAR" indicates "inflectional paradigm"; "M" is the fixed leading symbol for the paradigm; and "xx" is the number of the inflectional paradigm previously defined in the grammar.
• Inflectional rules are informed as INFR=FLX(<A-RULE>) where INFR indicates "inflectional rule"; "FLX" is the fixed leading tag for the inflection rules set; and <A-RULE> is the affixation rule, or set of affixation rules, used to generate the inflections out of the base form.

Examples of dictionary entries with inflectional information

[kill]{5987}"200355177"(FRA=Y38,LST=WRD,MOR=ROO,PAR=M16,POS=VER,TRA=TST) <eng,70,80>;
[bring] {2345}"200767334"(FRA=Y38,LST=WRD,MOR=STE,PAR=M22,POS=VER,TRA=TST,INFR=FLX(PAS:="brought";PTP:="brought";))<eng,50,34>;

Inflection or Agglutination?

The difference between inflection and agglutination is sometimes not that clear. In the UNLarium framework, we normally understand that inflection, differently from agglutination, provokes changes to the base form. In this sense, the genitive case is said to be inflectional in Latin ("campus">"campi") and concatenative (agglutinative) in English ("John">"John's"). Only the former, i.e., inflectional cases, must be included in inflectional paradigms.

Consider, for instance, the imaginary language A, where:

• "ABCDE" is the base form;
• "a","b","c","d" and "e" are appending forms (affixes, adpositions, particles, auxiliary words, etc.)

Given the difference between inflection and agglutination stated above, the following applies:

• appendix + altered base form = inflection (aBCDE, aFBCDE, aABDE, ...)
• appendix + base form = agglutination (aABCDE, aaABCDE, bABCDE, ...)
• altered base form + appendix = inflection (ABCDa, ABCDFa, ABDEa, ...)
• base form + appendix = agglutination (ABCDEa, ABCDEaa, ABCDEb, ...)
• appendix + altered base form + appendix = inflection (aBCDEb, aBDEb, aABCDb, ...)
• appendix + base form + appendix = agglutination (aABCDEb, aaABCDEb, bABCDEa, ...)

An example: gender

Several languages use auxiliary words, adpositions and even affixes (prefixes or suffixes) to convey attributes that sometimes can be understood as "inflectional". Compare the cases below:

• Latin: magister (base form), magister (masculine), magistra (feminine)
• English: teacher (base form), male teacher (masculine), female teacher (feminine)
• Spanish: profesor (base form), profesor (masculine), profesora (feminine)

Note that, in Latin, gender is clearly inflectional, because it involves a change in the base form ("magister">"magistra").
In English, the same gender attribute requires auxiliary words ("male" and "female"), but they do not affect the morphology of the base form ("teacher"). Therefore, this should be considered an agglutination, rather than an inflection, even if there would be no blank space in-between (i.e., "maleteacher" or "teachermale" would be still agglutinative).
In Spanish, gender is apparently formed by simply juxtaposing an "a" and, if so, it would be still agglutinative ("profesor">"profesora"), according to the principles above. However, we know that the morphology in Spanish is a little bit more complex than this, because "profesor", the base form which is also the masculine, actually contains already a masculine gender morpheme (the "zero" morpheme), which is replaced by "a" (i.e., "a" is not simply juxtaposed). In that sense, "profesor" is actually "profesor+&empty", which is replaced by "profesor+a", as in Latin "magist+er">"magist+ra". Therefore, gender in Spanish should be considered an inflection. We can clearly see this if we consider, for instance, the opposition "maestro" (masculine) x "maestra" (feminine), which are also possible candidates for "teacher" in Spanish.
Accordingly, Latin and Spanish gender, because inflectional, must be represented within paradigms, but this is not the case of English.