Inflection - Declension and Conjugation

Declension and Conjugation

Two traditional grammatical terms refer to inflections of specific word classes:

• Inflecting a noun, pronoun, adjective or determiner is known as declining it. The affixes may express number, case, or gender.
• Inflecting a verb is called conjugating it. The affixes may express tense, mood, voice, or aspect.

An organized list of the inflected forms of a given lexeme is also called its declension, or conjugation, as the case may be.

Below is the declension of the English pronoun I, which is inflected for case and number.

The pronoun who is also inflected in formal English according to case. Its declension is defective, in the sense that it lacks a reflexive form.

The following table shows the conjugation of the verb to arrive in the indicative mood. It is inflected for person, number, and tense by suffixation.

The non-finite forms arrive (bare infinitive), arrived (past participle) and arriving (gerund/present participle), although not inflected for person or number, can also be regarded as part of the conjugation of the verb to arrive. Compound verb forms such as I have arrived, I had arrived, or I will arrive can be included also in the conjugation of this verb for didactical purposes, but are not overt conjugations of arrive. The formula for deriving the covert form, in which the relevant inflections do not occur in the main verb, is

pronoun + conjugated auxiliary verb + non-finite form of main verb.