inflective
inflective — adjective
- inflectivepositive
- more inflectivecomparative
- most inflectivesuperlative
1. Relating to languages in which words change their form — by adding endings or ch
Relating to languages in which words change their form — by adding endings or changing a vowel, for example — to show grammatical functions such as tense, number, case, or gender.
Latin is a highly inflective language where noun endings show whether a word is the subject or the object.
collocation: highly inflective + language
Niran found it hard to learn Russian because it is an inflective language with many different word forms.
Languages like German and Arabic are more inflective than modern English, which has lost most of its old endings.
The class compared inflective and non-inflective languages to see how they express the same grammatical ideas.
Diya's first language is not inflective, so she had to learn a completely new way of building sentences at university.
- inflectional
The more common term; 'inflectional' can describe both languages and individual endings, while 'inflective' is less common and mostly limited to languages as a whole.
- synthetic
A wider linguistic category; synthetic languages use inflection AND agglutination, so 'synthetic' is broader than 'inflective'.
- fusional
Describes languages where a single ending carries multiple grammatical meanings at once; a subtype of inflective languages.
文法句型
inflective + noun (language)
用法筆記
Typically used to describe whole language systems rather than individual word forms. For individual endings or markers, the more common term is 'inflectional' (sense 2).
常見錯誤
2. Describing a grammatical marker such as an ending or suffix that changes a word'
Describing a grammatical marker such as an ending or suffix that changes a word's form to show its grammatical role — tense, number, case, or person — rather than creating a completely new word with a different meaning.
The suffix '-ed' is an inflectional ending that shows a verb happened in the past.
pattern: inflectional + ending/suffix/marker
Caleb learned that '-s' can be an inflectional marker for both plural nouns and third-person verbs in English.
In Latin, the inflectional ending '-arum' marks a noun as feminine, plural, and genitive all at the same time.
The teacher asked the students to find all the inflectional suffixes in a short passage of Latin text.
Unlike English, Turkish adds several inflectional markers one after another to a single word root.
- inflectional
The standard and far more common term; 'inflectional ending' is the ordinary way to describe affixes that mark grammar.
- grammatical
Broader — covers all grammar-related elements, not just inflection; e.g. grammatical markers include word order, particles, and function words.
- derivational
Describes affixes that create new words with different meanings (e.g. '-ness' turns 'happy' into 'happiness'), whereas inflective endings only change the grammatical form of the same word.
文法句型
inflectional + noun (ending, suffix, marker)
用法筆記
This sense overlaps heavily with 'inflectional', which is far more common in modern academic writing. Reserve 'inflective' for contexts where the alternative would sound imprecise or clumsy.