Oregon Educator Licensure Assessments (ORELA) Practice Exam

Which of the following is an example of an inflection in language?

1. Adding -ing to form a present participle

2. Creating new words through compounding

3. Using prefixes to modify meanings

4. Changing the tense of a verb

The correct answer is: Adding -ing to form a present participle

An inflection in language refers to a modification made to a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, and case. The addition of the suffix -ing to a verb is a clear example of inflection because it indicates the present participle form of the verb, which can convey ongoing action. For example, the verb "run" becomes "running," which alters its grammatical role to indicate an action currently in progress. This demonstrates how inflectional morphology adjusts a word's form without changing its essential meaning, making it contextually appropriate for the sentence structure. In contrast, other options focus on word formation processes such as compounding and the use of prefixes, which create new words or alter meanings but do not represent inflections that change the internal structure of existing words.