Inflective is an adjective used to describe a word or language that has grammatical inflections or changes in form to indicate various grammatical categories, such as tense, number, gender, case, mood, or person. It refers to the capacity of a word to undergo inflectional changes in order to express these different grammatical meanings.
In linguistics, inflection is the modification or alteration of a word's form to convey certain syntactic or semantic information. Inflective languages include inflections in their word forms, such as suffixes, prefixes, or infixes, to represent grammatical relationships between words.
For example, in English, the inflective nature of verbs allows the addition of endings to indicate different tenses (e.g., "walk" becomes "walked" to denote past tense), number (e.g., "cat" becomes "cats" to indicate plural), or person (e.g., "I walk" versus "he walks").
Inflective can also pertain to languages that predominantly use inflections as a means of expressing grammatical features, as opposed to relying heavily on word order or separate function words. Such languages often inflect nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs to convey information such as case, gender, number, or tense.
Overall, inflective refers to the ability of a word or language to change its form through inflections, assisting in the conveyance of grammatical information and relationships.
