Introduction: Approaching inflectional identity

Abstract The topic of this volume is inflectional identity. We group together under the term inflectional the morphological markers that participate in a “paradigmatically-related” alternation to express case, person, number, gender, or class distinctions. Identity covers and classifies a range of identity and similarity relations among the phonological form of these items. We refer, informally, to any n-way classification of verbal or nominal inflection as a paradigm, where the two (or more) dimensions could be tense and agreement (on verbs) or conjugation class and case (on nouns).