Grammatical categories

As we have seen in the examples above, inflection represents a morphological marking on items according to grammatical categories (for example tense, number or gender), which have a number of different values (e.g. masculine or feminine for gender). Categories relevant to English can have very different values and inflectional systems in other languages, as the brief survey of number and gender below will demonstrate.

Categories that are not manifested or that are marginal in English often play a significant role in the inflectional systems of other languages. Animacy, for example, is important in Navajo, in Basque and in Spanish, where animate direct objects are inflected with the preposition a:

está buscando una solución                       he is looking for a solution

está buscando a su hermano                     he is looking for his brother

For verbs, the category of aspect is marked more consistently than tense in Russian, the form of the verb indicating whether the action was perceived as ongoing or habitual (imperfective) or completed (perfective). Verbs may also be inflected for mood, the Romance languages notably having a full paradigm of inflections for the subjunctive mood, which marks the verbal action as hypothetical or in doubt, as in the following French examples:

مواضيع ذات صلة

Language Mixture—Grammar

Change in grammar and pronunciation

Word order

Grammaticalization.

Convergence in the Balkans

Did we lose the perfect tense already?

It’s grammaticalization, innit?

Haugen’s model

Diglossia

Language shift and language death

Stratification and hypercorrection

Exploring variation in language