Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- Having the power of bending.
- In grammar, exhibiting or characterized by inflection, or variation of the grammatical character of words in part by internal change: distinguished from
agglutinative .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Capable of, or pertaining to, inflection; deflecting.
- adjective (Gram.) Inflectional; characterized by variation, or change in form, to mark case, tense, etc.; subject to inflection.
- adjective (Philol.) a language like the Greek or Latin, consisting largely of stems with variable terminations or suffixes which were once independent words. English is both agglutinative, as,
manlike ,headache , and inflective, as,he ,his ,him . Cf.Agglutinative .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective That
inflects
Etymologies
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Examples
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"Ya Burnt!" can also be used with a questioning inflective as if the one who is supposed to be "burnt" has to answer for themselves as to whether or not they in fact are burnt by the situation at hand.
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In a letter to the Dutch EU presidency, the Lithuanian government insisted: "The non-inflective form of the term euro is unacceptable to the Lithuanian language."
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It is in this want of inflective grace that English, and more especially French, speakers lose so much of their force.
The Young Priest's Keepsake Michael Phelan
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Yet the possibility of such inflective languages should not be denied.
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We can call such languages inflective, if we like, but we must then be prepared to revise radically our notion of inflective form.
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Nothing could be more erroneous than to imagine that symbolic changes of the radical element, even for the expression of such abstract concepts as those of number and tense, is always associated with the syntactic peculiarities of an inflective language.
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If by an agglutinative language we mean one that affixes according to the juxtaposing technique, then we can only say that there are hundreds of fusing and symbolic languagesnon-agglutinative by definitionthat are, for all that, quite alien in spirit to the inflective type of Latin and Greek.
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A language may be both agglutinative and inflective, or inflective and polysynthetic, or even polysynthetic and isolating, as we shall see a little later on.
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Such a purely technical classification of languages as the current one into isolating, agglutinative, and inflective (read fusional) cannot claim to have great value as an entering wedge into the discovery of the intuitional forms of languages.
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We now to come to the difference between an inflective and an agglutinative language.
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