Parts of Speech and Grammatical Categories

In German, as in most other European languages, many words have inflected forms in addition to their base form. For instance, (ich) laufe and (ich) lief are inflected forms of the base form laufen. A base form such as Tisch can be inflected as Tischen. The grammatical meanings, which are usually called grammatical categories, are encoded in each form. Thus, both (ich) laufe and (ich) lief contain the three grammatical meanings of the first person, singular and active; additionally, (ich) laufe shows present tense in contrast to (ich) lief, the simple past form. The form Tischen as in auf den Tischen is clearly plural and dative, whereas Tisch always implies singular, but can be either nominative (der Tisch ist grin) or accusative (ich kaufe einen Tisch). Depending on whether words are inflected or not, they are labelled inflectible and non-inflectible. In accordance with the grammatical categories in which words are inflectible, these words are divided into verbs, nouns, adjectives, articles, and pronouns. Non-inflectible words are categorised according to their characteristics in a sentence, and comprise parts of speech including prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and particles. As a rule, grammatical categories are realised in various ways with the help of form elements, so-called inflectional morphemes. The comparative of an adjective always has its own morpheme -er (e.g. laut-er), but person and number share one morpheme in a verb (e.g. -t in er geh-t is simultaneously 3(rd) person and singular). Sometimes a grammatical feature is expressed not (only) through a morpheme, but (also) through a vowel change in the stem, for example, the umlaut phenomenon in the plural form Stuhl-e. Other features, such as present with a verb or singular with a noun are indicated only implicitly, not through a morpheme.