Inflectional morphology

Inflectional morphology is the study of the processes (such as affixation and vowel change) that distinguish the forms of words in certain grammatical categories.

In comparison to many other languages, the inflectional system of Modern English is fairly limited. (See inflectional morphemes.)

Inflectional morphology is customarily distinguished from derivational morphology (or word formation).

As A.Y. Aikhenvald points out, "Derivational morphology results in the creation of a new word with a new meaning. In contrast, inflectional morphology involves an obligatory grammatical specification characteristic of a word class" ("Typological Distinctions in Word-Formation" in Language Typology and Syntactic Description, 2007). This distinction, however, is not always clear-cut.