Inflectional categories

Abstract

This chapter explores inflectional categories. The criteria by which inflectional categories can be established were more complex. They are not of form alone, as was, for example, the distinction between basic or ‘first-struck’ words and ones morphologically ‘derived’. Nor are they of meaning only, as, for example, the varied ‘powers’ or subtypes of conjunctions. They were of correlations between meanings and forms. Modern ‘gender’ derives from terms in Greek (genos) and Latin (genus) that applied to classes whose members have a common birth or origin: thus ‘offspring’, ‘generation’, and ‘race’. For the grammarians, the criteria by which genders are distinguished were of how forms can combine in utterances. The remaining inflectional properties are those specific to verbs and participles. The most straightforward perhaps were those of what in modern grammars is called ‘voice’: in the term used by the Greek grammarians, such as Dionysius Thrax, diathesis.