Inflectional morphemes are a type of bound morpheme (a morpheme that cannot stand alone as a word) that modifies a word’s grammatical properties without changing its core meaning or part of speech. They are crucial in expressing grammatical relationships between words in a sentence.

Key characteristics of inflectional morphemes:

1. Do not change the word’s part of speech
2. Express grammatical categories like tense, number, gender, case, etc.
3. Usually occur at the end of a word (suffixes in English)
4. Do not create new lexemes (vocabulary items)

In English, there are eight inflectional morphemes:

1. Plural marker: -s (cats)
2. Possessive marker: -‘s (cat’s)
3. Third person singular present: -s (runs)
4. Past tense: -ed (walked)
5. Past participle: -en/-ed (eaten, walked)
6. Present participle: -ing (walking)
7. Comparative: -er (faster)
8. Superlative: -est (fastest)

Understanding inflectional morphemes is crucial for language learners as it affects sentence structure and grammatical agreement. In language teaching, focus is often placed on recognizing these morphemes and understanding their functions in different contexts.