More boring linguistics stuff.

[sacundim]

I like how inflectional morphology is subtle enough of a topic that, when talking about inflectional paradigms (for example, Latin conjugation tables), you really need to have separate technical terms for the boxes in the tables and the words inside them (paradigm cells vs. inflectional forms).

Comments

[det_n]

And how come you had that insight?

[sacundim]

Years of hard work, of course.

More seriously, because some grammatical rules refer to the first sort of thing, and others to the second. For example, rules about grammatical agreement always refer to paradigm cells; the English subject-verb agreement doesn't care about the differences between the way the plural is realized in cats, dogs, fishes, mice and oxen, as long as they're all plural. The morphophonological rules for the realization of the possessive marker, however, don't care about paradigm cells, but do care about the nature of the inflectional forms: the cats' meal (where the possessive has a zero realization), but the mice's lair and the oxen's feet (where the possessive has its normal realization).