Inflectional morphology

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Inflection morphology is a process in natural language processing.

To apply an inflection is to change the form of a word so as to give it extra meaning. This extra meaning could be:

Number
Person
Case
Gender
Tense
Mood
Aspect
Politeness (as in the Japanese language)

Inflectional morphology manifests primarily in the form of a prefix, suffix, or vowel change. A circumfix can also occur, but these are relatively rare.

An example of suffixes in inflectional morphology:

"I have an apple" - apple singular
"I have apples" - apple plural

The word apples is not a different word to apple. The extra s is simply giving the extra meaning - in this case, that there is more than one apple.

An example of vowel changes in inflectional morphology:

"I throw the pencil" - throw present tense
"I threw the pencil" - threw past tense

Again, throw and threw are not different words. threw is the result of inflectional morphology being applied to the root word throw.

English is relatively poor in inflectional morphology. Other Indo-European languages have a richer system of inflection morphology. Latin is a typical example of a language with a very rich system of inflectional morphology.

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