"In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness."
The modification of a word to express tense, case, number, gender or other grammatical categories.
Morphemes: The smallest units of meaning in language.
Inflectional Morphemes: Morphemes that do not create a new word but alter the grammatical function of a word.
Derivational Morphemes: Morphemes that create a new word.
Word classes: The grammatical classification of words in a language (such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs).
Stem: The core or base of a word to which inflectional or derivational morphemes are added.
Affixes: Morphemes that are attached to stems to create words.
Prefixes: Affixes that are added before the stem of a word.
Suffixes: Affixes that are added after the stem of a word.
Infixes: Affixes that are inserted into the middle of a stem.
Case: The grammatical category that marks the function of a noun, pronoun or adjective in a sentence.
Number: The grammatical category that marks the quantity of singular or plural.
Tense: The grammatical category that marks time (past, present, or future) of a verb.
Nominal Inflection: This type of inflection pertains to changes in the nouns, pronouns, and adjectives of a language to reflect grammatical categories such as gender, number, case, and person.
Verbal Inflection: This type of inflection pertains to changes in the verbs of a language to reflect different grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, mood, voice, and person.
Adverbial Inflection: This type of inflection pertains to changes in adverbs that reflect different grammatical categories, such as degree, manner, or negation.
Participle Inflection: This type of inflection pertains to changes in verbs, adjectives, or nouns to reflect their function as adjectives, adverbs, or nouns.
Gerund Inflection: This type of inflection pertains to changes in verbs to reflect their function as a noun.
Supine Inflection: This type of inflection pertains to changes in verbs to reflect their function as a noun-like infinitive used with certain prepositions or verbs.
Comparative Inflection: This type of inflection pertains to changes in adjectives or adverbs to reflect a greater or lesser degree of the quality they express.
Superlative Inflection: This type of inflection pertains to changes in adjectives or adverbs to reflect the greatest or least degree of the quality they express.
Degree Inflection: This type of inflection pertains to changes in adjectives to reflect the degree of the noun they modify.
Case Inflection: This type of inflection pertains to changes in nouns, pronouns, and adjectives to reflect their function in a sentence, such as the subject or the object of the verb.
"The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension."
"An inflection expresses grammatical categories with affixation (such as prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, and transfix), apophony (as Indo-European ablaut), or other modifications."
"For example, the Latin verb ducam, meaning 'I will lead,' includes the suffix -am, expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense-mood (future indicative or present subjunctive)."
"The inflected form of a word often contains both one or more free morphemes (a unit of meaning which can stand by itself as a word), and one or more bound morphemes (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."
"Words that are never subject to inflection are said to be invariant; for example, the English verb must is an invariant item: it never takes a suffix or changes form to signify a different grammatical category."
"For example, the English verb must is an invariant item."
"Languages that seldom make use of inflection, such as English, are said to be analytic."
"Highly inflected languages include Latin, Greek, Biblical Hebrew, and Sanskrit."
"Languages in which each inflection conveys only a single grammatical category, such as Finnish, are known as agglutinative languages."
"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."
"Requiring the forms or inflections of more than one word in a sentence to be compatible with each other according to the rules of the language is known as concord or agreement."
"For example, in 'the man jumps,' 'man' is a singular noun, so 'jump' is constrained in the present tense to use the third person singular suffix 's'."
"Languages that have some degree of inflection are synthetic languages."
"Slightly inflected languages include English, Dutch, and Persian."
"Languages that are so inflected that a sentence can consist of a single highly inflected word (such as many Native American languages) are called polysynthetic languages."
"The inflection of verbs in English is called conjugation."
"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."
"Analytic languages that do not make use of derivational morphemes, such as Standard Chinese, are said to be isolating."
"For example, Finnish is known as an agglutinative language." Note: This response is generated based on the information provided and may not contain direct quotes from the original paragraph.