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Inflection

Device
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Morphological alteration of a word’s form (e.g., tense, case, number) to signal grammatical relationships, often exploited for poetic nuance.

Detailed Definition
Inflection in poetry refers to the modulation of voice—pitch, tone, stress—that conveys meaning beyond words, or grammatically, to word endings that indicate tense, case, or number; poets manipulate inflection through meter, punctuation, and lineation to guide oral performance and interpretive nuance.
Example
Example in poetry:
Inflection: In Old English poetry like “Beowulf,” inflectional endings (e.g., “cyninges” for “of the king”) indicate grammatical relationships without prepositions, shaping alliterative verse structure.
Additional Notes
Inflection: Change in word form to express grammatical function (e.g., verb tense, noun number); in poetry, inflectional endings affect meter and syntax—e.g., archaic inflections in Spenser for metrical or stylistic effect.
Also Known As
Word ending Grammatical marker Suffix variation Morphological change Flectendo
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