What is the difference between derivation and inflection?

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What is the difference between derivation and inflection?

Derivation and inflection are two fundamental processes in word formation within the field of phonetics. While both processes involve modifying words, they differ in terms of their purpose and the changes they bring to the word.

Derivation refers to the process of forming new words by adding affixes to a base or root word. These affixes can be prefixes (added at the beginning of a word), suffixes (added at the end of a word), or infixes (added within a word). The purpose of derivation is to create new words with different meanings or to change the grammatical category of a word. For example, adding the prefix "un-" to the word "happy" creates the derived word "unhappy," which has the opposite meaning. Similarly, adding the suffix "-er" to the verb "teach" forms the derived noun "teacher."

On the other hand, inflection involves modifying a word to indicate grammatical information such as tense, number, gender, case, or person. Inflectional changes do not create new words but rather alter the form of a word to fit its grammatical context. These changes are typically achieved by adding inflectional affixes, such as verb endings for tense or noun endings for pluralization. For instance, the verb "walk" can be inflected to "walked" to indicate past tense, or the noun "cat" can be inflected to "cats" to indicate plurality.

In summary, the main difference between derivation and inflection lies in their purpose and the changes they bring to words. Derivation creates new words or changes their meanings and grammatical categories, while inflection modifies words to indicate grammatical information without creating new words.