Default meanings of inflectional categories

The default meaning of an inflection is a basic property identifying classes, relation to deictic coordinates, or roles, of participants in the situational context of utterance. The meanings are in part conventional, that is, lexicalised and to some extent arbitrary and dependent on the properties of lexical items.

Gender: Sex of participant with a given role, male and female (implying animate) and neuter, or inanimate object

• masculine as male, feminine as female
• But: Look at that machine. She's a beauty.

Case: Role of participant in an action or a state

• Nominative as agent
• But: John was seen by Mary

Number: Size of set of objects referred to

• Quantity of items referred to - one, many
• But: trousers; many cheeses - `kinds of cheese'

Person: Roles of communicators

• Participant in communication - speaker, addressee, third party
• But: one/you/we might think ... - for 1st pers sing

Tense: Temporal relation of events to each other and to speaker

• Time of events in relation to the time of utterance - overlapping, preceding
• But: Just imagine, yesterday I go into town, and ...

An additional task set:

• What is a declension and what is a conjugation?
• Are additional categories required for German?
• Give examples of non-default meanings for inflectional categories in English and in German.

Useful background reading from a traditional point of view is Jespersen (cf. [16]).