Arkansas Foundations of Reading Test (FORT)

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What is the purpose of inflectional affixes?

To change the meaning of a word
To change the part of speech of a word
To recycle affixes
To serve a grammatical function without changing the part of speech

The correct answer is: To serve a grammatical function without changing the part of speech

Inflectional affixes serve a grammatical function by altering tense, number, mood, or case without changing the part of speech of the base word. For example, adding "-s" to "cat" changes it from singular to plural but retains its identity as a noun. Similarly, adding "-ed" to a verb like "walk" indicates past tense while still being a verb. The primary role of inflectional affixes is to provide grammatical context, allowing for the expression of relationships between different words in a sentence, rather than creating new words or altering their categories. In contrast, changing the meaning of a word or altering its part of speech involves derivational affixes, which is not the function of inflectional affixes. The mention of recycling affixes does not pertain to how inflectional affixes function in relation to words in English.