Writing Textbooks Boundless Writing Overview of English Grammar: Parts of Speech Introduction to English Grammar and Mechanics
Writing Textbooks Boundless Writing Overview of English Grammar: Parts of Speech
Writing Textbooks Boundless Writing
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Concept Version 6
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Introduction to Inflection

In the context of grammar, inflection is altering a word to change its form, usually by adding letters.

Learning Objective

  • Define grammatical inflection

Key Points

    • In English grammar, "inflection" refers to changing a word to suit its grammatical context (e.g., making a noun plural when you're talking about more than one, making a verb past tense when you're talking about something that has already happened).
    • In English, there are many rules that tell you how to change words to suit context, but there are also quite a few exceptions that you'll just have to memorize.
    • Pronouns and nouns change form depending on whether they are the subject (i.e., the actor) or the direct or indirect object (i.e., the thing being acted upon) of a sentence.

Terms

  • conjugation

    The creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection.

  • declension

    The inflection of nouns, pronouns, articles, and adjectives.

  • inflection

    In the grammatical sense, modifying a word, usually by adding letters, to create a different form of that word.

Full Text

In English grammar, "inflection" is the broad umbrella term for changing a word to suit its grammatical context. You’ve probably never heard this word before, but you actually do it all the time without even thinking about it. For example, you know to say "Call me tomorrow" instead of "Call I tomorrow”; you’ve changed the noun “I” to fit the context (i.e., so it can be used as a direct object instead of a subject).

A word you might have heard before, especially if you’ve taken a foreign language like Spanish, is “conjugation.” Conjugation is the specific type of inflection that has to do with verbs. For example, you change a verb based on who is performing the verb: you would say “You call me,” but “She calls me.” Again, you know to do this automatically.

Nouns and Pronouns

We often need to change nouns based on grammatical context. For example, if you change from singular to plural (e.g., from “cat” to “cats,” or from “syllabus” to “syllabi”), you’re “inflecting” the noun. Similarly, if you’re changing the pronoun “I” to “me,” or “she” to “her,” the person you’re referring to isn’t changing, but the word you use does, because of context. "She calls I" is incorrect, as is "Her calls me"; you know to instead say "She calls me."

Verbs

To recap, "conjugation" refers to changing a verb to suit its grammatical context. This can mean changing the verb based on who is performing the verb (e.g., “you read,” but “she reads”) or based on the time the action is occurring, also known as the verb’s “tense” (e.g., “you walk” for the present, and “you walked” for the past).

Adjectives

You also might need to change some adjectives based on the grammatical context of the rest of your sentence. For example, if you’re trying to compare how sunny today’s weather is to yesterday’s weather, you would change the adjective “sunny” to “sunnier”: “Today is sunnier than yesterday.”

Adverbs

Inflecting adverbs is very similar to how you change adjectives. For example, if you want to compare how quickly two students are learning math, you would change the adverb “easily” to “more easily”: “Huck is learning his fractions much more easily than Tom is.”

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