Inflectional Rules of Morphology

The term “inflection" in linguistics refers to a change in the form of a word ,

according to its grammatical function in a sentence. Many languages (including
English) have bound Morphemes, that have a strictly “grammatical function “
to perform. They masks the properties such as “tense" ,” number" , “gender"
case and so forth such bound Morphemes are called “Inflectional Morphemes"
example in a sentence like:
She eats an apple ,the “s” at the end of the verb is an agreement marker, it
signifies that the subject of the verb is “ third person", singular , and is in
present tense similarly in a sentence like:
He walked slowly , the suffix “ed" indicates “past tense"
Thus “ s" and “ed" in these verbs are the examples of Inflectional Morphemes.
Inflection thus expresses morphologntactic information (ie . syntactic
information expressed morphologically).
English is no longer a highly inflected language, but we do have Inflectional
endings such as the plural suffix , Which is attached to certain singular Nouns
as in.
Girl. + s. = girls
Dog. + s. = dogs
Cat. + s. = cats
At the present stage of English, these are eight bound Inflectional affixes.
English Inflectional morphemes:
1 : (S) Third person , singular, present.
Eg. She comes to school.
2 : (ed) past tense.
Eg. She cooked food.
3 : (ing) Progressive
Eg. She is going to school.
4 : (en) past participle.
Eg. She has eaten the donuts.
5 : (s) Plural
She ate the donuts.
6 : (‘S) Possessive.
Eg. Jane's hair is short.
7 : (er) Comparative
Eg. Mary is older than her sister.
8 : (est) Superlative
Eg. Diana has the shortest hair.

Suppletions :
Suppletion in linguistic morphology refers to the use of a “Particular form
of verb “, that is not related to the “ main form of the verb".
Eg. “ went" is a particular form of a verb (ie past tense),and is not related to
the main form verb (ie. “go") . Similarly the paradigm for the verb “be" is
characterized by suppletions “Am" ,are , is , was , were , etc.

Conjugation :
Conjugation in Linguistic refers to an alteration in the form of verbs.
Eg.
Drive, drove , driven, Drives, and Driving , are the different alteration
regarding single verb ie “ drive" similarly the forms of verb like “Drive" ,“drank”
,drunk, drinks, and drinking , are some of the other examples in this regard.

Declension:
Declension refers to a kind of grammatical process in which some sets
of nouns, adjectives and pronouns change their original forms or ending. Eg .
Noun :
Book , books , pen , pens , city , cities, mouse , mice , leaf leaves, child,
children etc.
Adjectives:
Wise , wiser , wisest
Far , farther , farthest
Noble , Nobler , Noblest
Pronouns:
(He , she , it , they , etc )
(I , we ) , (My , Mine )
( Our , Ours ) , ( Me , Us ), ( your , yours ) etc.
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Inflection verses Derivation :

1 : Inflection does not change the core lexical meaning as the lexical category
of the word to which it belongs.
Derivational changes the lexical meaning of the word and may change the
lexical category as well .
2 : Inflection is the realization of morphologntactic features (ie case, gender,
number ) etc .
Derivational on the other hand , is not the realization of morphologntactic
features.
3 : Derivational morphology tends to occur clauses to the root as stem of word
, than Inflectional morphology.
4 : Derivational morphology are more likely to be stored in the lexical them
inflected forms
5 : Inflectional morphology is considered to be more productive than
Derivational morphology.
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