The inflectional system

Abstract

This chapter provides a survey of the inflection of nouns, adjectives, and verbs in Dutch. Productive nominal inflection is restricted to making plural forms of nouns. In addition, there are remnants of case marking that function as markers of specific constructions. Adjectives are only inflected in pre-nominal position, in which gender also plays a role. Verbs are inflected according to two systems: weak verbs by means of suffixation, strong verbs by means of stem change (mainly vowel alternations or Ablaut). Some tense forms are periphrastic in nature. This chapter introduces the distinction between inherent and contextual inflection, and shows that inherent inflection may feed word formation. Thus use of inflectional forms is subject to syntactic restrictions, and its use is also pragmatically determined.