ABSTRACT
All Italian words contain a lexical root, which expresses the basic meaning of the word (e.g., meanings such as ‘dog’; ‘love’; ‘sing’; ‘happy’; ‘large’; ‘from’; ‘for’, and so forth). Most roots are unanalysable, which is to say that they cannot be further broken down into meaningful elements. The overwhelming majority of nouns and adjectives, and all verbs, have an inflectional ending (or ‘inflectional desinence’) following the stem or the root. The modern Italian nouns and adjectives are morphologically invariant so far as the signalling of case is concerned. The overwhelming majority of modern nouns and adjectives appear to derive from Latin accusative forms. In Italian, the grammatical gender of a noun is largely arbitrary: there is little correlation between meaning and gender, and little correlation between gender and morphological form. Italian, like all Romance languages, has definite and indefinite articles.
