inflective
inflective — 形容詞
- inflectivepositive
- more inflectivecomparative
- most inflectivesuperlative
1. Relating to languages in which words change their form — by adding endings or ch
屈折的
詞形變化表文法關係的
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.
拉丁語是一種高度屈折的語言，名詞詞尾會顯示該詞是主語還是受詞。
collocation: highly inflective + language
Niran found it hard to learn Russian because it is an inflective language with many different word forms.
Niran 覺得俄語很難學，因為俄語是一種屈折語言，有許多不同的詞形變化。
Languages like German and Arabic are more inflective than modern English, which has lost most of its old endings.
德語和阿拉伯語等語言比現代英語更屈折，現代英語已失去了大部分古老的詞尾。
The class compared inflective and non-inflective languages to see how they express the same grammatical ideas.
全班比較了屈折語言與非屈折語言，觀察兩者如何表達相同的文法概念。
Diya's first language is not inflective, so she had to learn a completely new way of building sentences at university.
Diya 的母語不是屈折語言，所以她必須在大學學習一套全新的句子建構方式。
- 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'
詞形變化的
指文法標記如詞尾或後綴
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.
詞尾「-ed」是表示動詞發生在過去的詞形變化後綴。
pattern: inflectional + ending/suffix/marker
Caleb learned that '-s' can be an inflectional marker for both plural nouns and third-person verbs in English.
Caleb 學到「-s」在英語中可以是複數名詞，也可以是第三人稱動詞的詞形變化標記。
In Latin, the inflectional ending '-arum' marks a noun as feminine, plural, and genitive all at the same time.
在拉丁語中，詞形變化詞尾「-arum」同時標示名詞為陰性、複數及屬格。
The teacher asked the students to find all the inflectional suffixes in a short passage of Latin text.
老師要求學生找出一段拉丁文短文中所有的詞形變化後綴。
Unlike English, Turkish adds several inflectional markers one after another to a single word root.
與英語不同，土耳其語可以在單一詞根上接續加上多個詞形變化標記。
- 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.