The same dictionary word appears as walk, walks, walked, and walking. Inflection is the morphological marking of grammatical features such as tense, number, person, case, or gender on a word without creating a new lexical item.

Inflectional paradigms organize the set of forms a single lexeme can take. Languages range from isolating systems with almost no inflection to highly synthetic systems with elaborate paradigms. Agreement phenomena often depend on inflectional features shared across words.

Learners memorize or internalize inflection patterns to produce grammatical sentences. Historical change may simplify or reorganize paradigms through analogy and sound change. Descriptive and pedagogical grammars devote major sections to inflectional morphology.

• Grammatical modification of a word’s form
• Marks features like tense, number, and case
• Does not create a new dictionary word
• Organized in paradigms of related forms