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

  • "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.

    Gary Rudoren: Ya Burnt: A Catchphase for Our Time 2008

  • 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."

    languagehat.com: THE ERISTIC GENITIVE OF EURO. 2004

  • 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

  • Yet the possibility of such “inflective” languages should not be denied.

    Chapter 6. Types of Linguistic Structure 1921

  • We can call such languages inflective, if we like, but we must then be prepared to revise radically our notion of inflective form.

    Chapter 6. Types of Linguistic Structure 1921

  • 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.

    Chapter 6. Types of Linguistic Structure 1921

  • 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 languages—non-agglutinative by definition—that are, for all that, quite alien in spirit to the inflective type of Latin and Greek.

    Chapter 6. Types of Linguistic Structure 1921

  • 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.

    Chapter 6. Types of Linguistic Structure 1921

  • 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.

    Chapter 6. Types of Linguistic Structure 1921

  • We now to come to the difference between an “inflective” and an “agglutinative” language.

    Chapter 6. Types of Linguistic Structure 1921

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