Inflection Rule

An Inflection Rule is a Morphological Rule that converts a Lexeme to a Word Form.

• AKA: Morphological Inflection Rule, Inflectional Rule, Inflexional Rule, Word Inflection Rule.
• Context:
  • It can be:
    • a Pluralization Rule used by a Pluralization Process.
    • a Possessivization Rule used by a Possessivization Process.
  • It can produced the Input to a Post-Inflectional Rule (such as a Word Contraction Rule).
• Example(s):
  • Pluralize("kick”) ⇒ “kicks”).
  • Pluralize("kicker”) ⇒ “dogs”).
  • Pluralize("wolf”) ⇒ “wolves”).
  • Possessive("dog”) ⇒ “dog's”).
  • Possessive("wolf”) ⇒ “wolf's”).
  • Pluralize(Possessive("wolf”)) ⇒ "wolves").
  • Pluralize(Possessive("sister in law”)) ⇒ “sisters-in-law's”).
  • a Conjugation Rule.
  • any Declension Rule.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • A Derivational Rule.
    • A Nominalization Rule.
    • A Compounding Rule.
  • A Post-Inflectional Rule.
• See: Derivational Rule.

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References

• (WordNet, 2009) ⇒ http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=inflect
  • S: (v) inflect (change the form of a word in accordance as required by the grammatical rules of the language)
  • S: (v) tone, inflect, modulate (vary the pitch of one's speech)
• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection
  • In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, case. In covert inflection, such categories are not overtly expressed. [1] Overt inflection typically distinguishes lexical items (such as lexemes) from functional ones (such as affixes, clitics, particles and morphemes in general) and has functional items acting as markers on lexical ones. [2] Lexical items that do not respond to overt inflection are typically invariant. [3] Constraining cross-referencing inflection at the sentence level is known as concord or agreement.
• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_conjugation
  • In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb, noun or adjective from its principal parts by inflection (regular alteration according to rules of grammar). Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories. All the different forms of the same verb constitute a lexeme and the form of the verb that is conventionally used to represent the canonical form of the verb is a lemma.
  • Conjugated forms of a verb are called finite forms. In many languages there are also one or more forms that remain unchanged with all or most of grammatical categories: the non-finite forms, such as the infinitive or the gerund. A table giving all the conjugated variants of a verb in a given language is called a conjugation table or a verb paradigm.
  • A regular verb has a paradigm of conjugation that derives all forms from a few specific forms or principal parts (maybe only one, such as the infinitive in English). When a verb cannot be conjugated straightforwardly like this, it is said to be irregular. Typically the principal parts are the root and/or several modifications of it (stems).
  • Conjugation is also the traditional name of a group of verbs that share a similar conjugation pattern in a particular language (a verb class). This is the sense in which teachers say that Latin has four conjugations of verbs. This means that any regular Latin verb can be conjugated in any person, number, tense, mood, and voice by knowing which of the four conjugation groups it belongs to, and its principal parts.

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