Of contrastive typology

Types of the Inflexional Morphemes in the Contrasted Languages.

In English morphology, an inflectional morpheme is a suffix that's added to a word to assign a particular grammatical property to that word.

Inflectional morphemes serve as grammatical markers that indicate tense, number, possession, or comparison. Inflectional morphemes in English include the bound morphemes -s (or -es); 's (or s'); -ed; -en; -er; -est; and -ing.

Unlike derivational morphemes, inflectional morphemes do not change the essential meaning or the grammatical category of a word.

Only English nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (all open classes of words) take inflectional affixes. Closed classes of words take no inflectional affixes in English. Inflectional affixes always follow derivational ones if both occur in a word, which makes sense if we think of inflections as affixes on fully formed words. For example, the words antidisestablishmentarianism and uncompartmentalize each contain a number of derivational affixes, and any inflectional affixes must occur at the end: antidisestablishmentarianisms and uncompartmentalized.
Whereas a derivational morpheme relates more to the identity of a word itself (in that it more directly affects the meaning of the stem), an inflectional morpheme relates the word to the rest of the construction, motivating a position on the very periphery of the word.

An inflectional morpheme does not have the capacity to change the meaning or the syntactic class of the words it is bound to and will have a predictable meaning for all such words. Thus, the present tense will mean the same thing regardless of the verb that is inflected, and the dative case will have the same value for all nouns. Semantic abstraction and relativity do not mean that there is little or simple meaning involved; inflectional categories are never merely automatic or semantically empty. The meanings of inflectional categories are difficult to describe, but they exhibit all the normal behavior we expect from cognitive categories, such as grounding in embodied experience and radial structured polysemy.

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