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In linguistics, declension (verb: to decline) is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and determiners to indicate number (e.g. singular, dual, plural), case (e.g. nominative, accusative, genitive ...
- An Overview of Declension
- What Is A Declension?
- Final Thoughts on Declensions
What is declension?
Declensionrefers to the changes that a noun (or pronoun or adjective) undergoes to indicate its role in a sentence. In many languages, declension involves changing the endings on the noun. These changeable endings are called case endings. So, when we decline a noun, this means that we add the appropriate case ending to it. Modern English does not have a very developed declension system, but we do still use some case endings. Personal pronouns are a great example. Consider the following forms....
Case and Number
What, you may ask, is the point of declension? Ultimately, it is to give us information about a noun so we know how it fits into a sentence. There are two main properties that declension clarifies: case and number. Every noun has both case and number. A noun’s case tells you what it is doing in a sentence. Up above, we saw an example of case with the he vs. him variation. He is in the subjective case, so the use of he tells us that the pronoun is the subject. Him is in the objective case, so...
Etymology of Declension
The etymology of the word “declension” can also help us understand its meaning. The ultimate source is the Latin noun declīnātiō. Declīnātiō literally means “a bending aside” or “a turning away from”. It is a noun formed from the verb declīnō, “to bend or turn aside”. Originally the word had a physical sense. You can “turn aside” from the road you are on, for instance. Or you can “bend your body aside” to avoid a spear. But the Romans soon applied the concept to language, too. Why? Because wh...
So far I have explained the general meaning of declension: a blanket term for variation in noun endings. But what is a declension? What does it mean to write out the declension of a noun or to find a noun’s declension? Here’s the thing. There are actually two more specific definitions of declension. And this is where most of the confusion arises fo...
I hope that you now understand declensions a bit better. To summarize: declension, broadly speaking, refers to any variation that a noun undergoes to clarify its meaning and role in a sentence. But remember that we also have two specific definitions of a declension: 1. a list of all the case forms of a noun (also called a paradigm) 2. a group or ca...
Declension refers to the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and articles to show the word's syntactic function within a sentence. Inflection is a morphological process that involves adding affixes to a word or changing a word's spelling to show different grammatical functions. In modern English, declension is most prominent in ...
Declension is a grammatical system used in some languages to indicate the various forms of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. It involves changing the endings of words to reflect their grammatical function in a sentence, such as subject, object, or possessive.
Nov 21, 2023 · Declension is the inflectional forms of nouns, pronouns, articles, adjectives and is a crosslinguistic phenomenon occurring across many languages. However, not all languages apply declension in ...
1 λ 1 µ 1 π 1 • σ 2 λ 2 µ 2 π 2 = σ 1 S σ 2 λ 1 L λ 2 µ 1 M µ 2 π 1 P π 2 Definition 2 A language is a set of signs. A grammar consists of a set of signs (called lexicon) together with a finite set of functions that each operate on signs. Typically, though not necessarily, the grammars that linguists design for natural
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What is declension in linguistics?
What is a declension in English?
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What does declension tell us about a noun?
Do all languages have declension?
What are the three grammatical functions of declension?
In general, inflection is the modification of words in a sentence. More precisely, it is called declension when certain words are changed according to grammatical cases, among other things. This way, various functions can be assigned to the different parts of the sentence (constituents). Since a case system does not exist in English or is only ...
