The patterns of changing endings in inflecting languages which cover multiple properties of a word such as tense, mood, person, number, case, etc. This general term covers conjugation of verbs and declension of nouns and adjectives.
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Languages with vowel-based “radicals” inflected or derived by changing consonants?
Semitic languages are known for doing quite a bit of their inflection and derivation not via adfixes but via modifications around a triliteral radical of three consonants.
But I'm wondering if ...
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Which prefixing language has the most speakers?
Most if not all national or widely spoken languages with an inflecting or agglutinating typology do all of their inflecting at the end of the word. These are called "suffixing languages".
This is ...
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Do any languages have verbal inflection with a plural object?
The verb in a language like English can inflect for person, for example:
I see the cat > he sees the cat
and the verb can inflect for tense:
I see the cat > I saw the cat
But do any languages ...
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Third-person singular suffix [eth] in Middle English
Related: Grammaticalization of third person singular -s in English
According to responses to this question, there was a dichotomy between northern -s and southern -th in Middle English.
What I am ...
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915 views
Derivational vs. Inflectional Morphemes
Is the derivational/inflectional morpheme distinction particularly significant to linguists?
If so, is it more significant for languages other than English, which I think is less "inflected" than ...
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154 views
What is the maximum number of forms a (modern) Japanese verb can take?
Recently I've begun to wonder how many possible forms can be made from a single Japanese verb.
I asked a similar question first on the Japanese Language & Usage site, where I received some ...
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285 views
Do sign languages inflect?
I saw the statement a few times that sign languages inflect in the same way that spoken languages do, but all examples I came across refer to phenomena that I would classify as word formation rather ...
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Grammaticalization of third person singular -s in English
Is there any evidence that the third person singular -s can be traced back to a lexical item before it became an inflection? I am trying to see if the theory of grammaticalization applies to its ...
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219 views
How do linguists distinguish between case endings and postpositions, especially in languages which have both and/or have no traditional grammar
In my attempt to learn Georgian, an agglutinative language of the South Caucasus, I have learned that it has both case endings and postpositions.
I also have some familiarity with Korean and Japanese ...
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101 views
Segmental exponents of tense/aspect on subject pronouns?
Languages with tonal inflection for tense/aspect/mood occasionally have tones associated with certain inflectional categories which are realized on pronouns, e.g. Ngbaka, where the imperfect and the ...
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242 views
Are there any recent articles on the current state of Case theory?
Specifically I'm interested in the split between Structural Case and Morphological case.
Structural Case has been part of Chomskyan syntactic theory since at least Government & Binding (GB). ...
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What's the difference between accusative, unaccusative, ergative, and unergative?
What does it mean for a language or verb to be one or the other of these typologies (examples would help)? Can it be more than one at once?
PS I wasn't sure whether this would be better classified as ...
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What are some examples of well-known agglutinatve languages moving toward inflecting morphology?
We've had questions about inflected languages moving towards analytic morphology and about isolating languages moving to agglutinating morphology but we haven't yet investigated the third case.
In ...
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451 views
What is the origin of non-natural grammatical genders in Indo-European languages?
What is the origin of non-natural grammatical genders in Indo-European languages? (assuming that there is a single origin, if there are many, what are they) How and for what purpose did it develop? ...
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316 views
French conjugation, spoken vs written
French verbs are conjugated depending on the subject's person and number (ex. je parle, tu parles, il parle, etc.) However in spoken language most of these sound the same anyway because the end part ...
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Why do English verbs inflect so little, especially in regard to “person”?
Most Indo-European languages have verbs which endings change according to the person. I made a table with the most common (and close) languages and focussed on the category of person and the present ...
