Inflection

Revision as of 12:52, 19 March 2010

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.

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).

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 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, the word must be associated to the general conjugation model, and only the exceptions must be 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.