Native speakers of English are often surprised at the kinds of inflection that can be found in languages – English is a language that has relatively little inflection, as languages go. So we’ll start by surveying some of the types of inflection that can be found in the languages of the world.

Number

Perhaps the most familiar inflectional category for speakers of English is number. In English, nouns can be marked as singular or plural:

Although the vast majority of nouns pluralize in English by adding -s (or in terms of sounds, one of the variants [s], [z], or [ǝz]), some nouns form their plurals irregularly. We will return to the issue of regular versus irregular inflections shortly. In English, it is required to mark the plural on nouns in a context in which more than one of that noun is being discussed (I have six beagles). This is not the case in all languages, as our Mandarin Chinese example illustrated.

Some languages distinguish a third category of number in addition to singular and plural. For example, in the Eskimo-Aleut language Yup’ik, nouns inflect not only for singular and plural, but also for what is called dual. This is a number-marking that means ‘two’:

As we’ll see soon, some languages can make the singular/dual/plural distinction on verbs, as well as on nouns.