English Sharing - Inflection

Inflection (or Inflexion)

In English, aword in its bare form can be modified by an inflection to express different grammatical categories or to change the syntactic function. The more common ones you may come across are tense, grammatical voice, person, number and case.

For example:

Bare form	Inflection	Grammatical category
praise	praised	Tense
take	(is) taken	Voice
interview	interviewer, interviewee	Person
car	cars	Number
they	them (object pronoun), theirs (possessive pronoun)	Case
she	her (object pronoun), hers (possessive pronoun)	Case
music	musical	Adjective (syntactic role)

When answering a question, you need to make sure your answer is correctly inflected. Do not just put a word in its bare form on your answer sheet. Your meaning may be correct but your answer is still wrong.

For example:

Q:           What sort of instruments does this shop sell?
A:            musical (instruments)

Here, the word “music” is inflected to from an adjective. It is wrong to use just “music” as your answer.

Q:           Which types of community group does the speaker give examples of?
A:            music (group)

Here, the two nouns (i.e. “music” and “group”) go side by side to form a compound. In this case, inflection is not necessary.

Q:           What two factors can make social contact in a foreign country difficult?
A:            Customs and language

Here, the word “custom” should be inflected to indicate more than one custom (i.e. customs). You score no marks for just writing “custom”.

Chinese is a language that never uses inflections. It is therefore very common for Chinese students to overlook the importance of inflection when they communicate in English. Always pay attention to inflections when you express yourself in English.

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