Inflectional English is associated with which feature?

• A. Voice
• B. Tense
• C. Number
• D. Aspect

Answer: (A)

Inflectional morphology changes a word’s form to signal grammatical features, and in English this is most clearly seen with voice. The passive voice is formed by inflecting the auxiliary be (am, is, are, was, were, being, been) to match tense and number and by using the past participle of the main verb. This combination directly encodes the relationship between the subject and the action, showing who is affected by the action rather than who performs it. While tense and aspect involve verb forms too, the distinctive inflectional signal that marks voice—through the be-auxiliary plus past participle construction—makes voice the feature most closely tied to inflection in English.