Inflection from the perspective of general linguistics – some remarks

Abstract

Inflection is a feature distinguished virtually from the beginning of philosophical and philological thought on language in the European tradition of linguistic and pre-linguistic description. Inflectional phemomena, usually viewed by users of inflectional languages in terms of correctness of word forms of dictionary units in utterances, may be identified as a manifestation of paradigmatic organization of lexical assets of language. Formalization of inflecting features may thus be described, from a naive though cognitively useful perspective, as a manifestation of more profound rules concerning the language matter, preserved and relevant in its structure. The paper points at certain properties and internal relations of inflec-tion. They may, for various reasons, not be equally obvious to the users of languages with inflecting and non-inflecting characteristics. Moreover, such properties, which concern basically three areas: morphology, semantics, and syntax, are perceived differently when related to the features of one’s own language code and when compared with other codes, quite independently of peculiar properties that hypothetically could make it possible to confirm or to deny the validity of their description in inflective terms.