Inflectional morphology of nouns and verbs

Nouns

Nouns are often inflected for number (i.e. singular vs. plural,
as in English) and sometimes gender or 
noun class.  The commonest kind of inflection on nouns is for 
case, i.e. the noun is marked with morphemes which tell whether it 
is being used as subject, direct object, indirect object, etc.  For 
example, here are the case/number forms of the Russian feminine noun
sobaka 'dog' (the first column are singular forms, the second
column plural):

     nominative     sobaka         sobaki
     genitive       sobaki         sobak
     accusative     sobaku         sobak
     dative         sobakje        sobakam
     instrumental   sobakei        sobakjami
     prepositional  sobakje        sobakjax

A set of inflected forms like this--the same stem with all the
different inflectional affixes which it can take--is called a
paradigm.

The nominative case form is used for the subject of a
sentence:

          sobaka   vidjet menja    'The dog sees me.'
          dog(NOM) sees   me

The accusative is used for the direct object:

          ya vidu sobaku           'I see the dog.'
          I  see  dog(ACC)

And the dative is used for the indirect object:

          ya dal  sobakje  xleb    'I gave the dog bread.'
          I  gave dog(DAT) bread

The genitive is the possessive form:

          sobaki   xleb  'the dog's bread'
          dog(GEN) bread

The other two cases are used after certain prepositions.


Verbs

Verbs may be inflected for a wide variety of categories, most of
which are beyond the scope of this course.  Next to tense (as in
English or Japanese), one of the commonest inflectional
categories of the verb is the person and number of the subject
(or, in some languages, both subject and object).  For example,
here are the present-tense person/number paradigms for the
verb in German and Russian:

               English        German         Russian

1st person sg. I make         ich mach-e     ja djela-ju
2nd person sg. you make       du mach-st     ty djela-ješ
3rd person sg. he makes       er mach-t      on djela-jet
1st person pl. we make        wir mach-en    my djela-jem
2nd person pl. you make       ihr mach-t     vy djela-jetje
3rd person pl. they make      sie mach-en    oni djela-jut

You can see that Russian has a complete paradigm, that is, there
are six different endings for the verb, corresponding to three
persons times two numbers.
   Again, these sets of forms are paradigms.  We say that -ju, 
-ješ, -jet, -jem, -jetje, -jut are in paradigmatic relationship 
to one another--that is, they fill the same slot in a combinatorial 
formula NOUN + CASE.
     Russian djela- and -jet, like German mach- and  
-t and English make and -s, are in syntagmatic 
relation to one another--in this case, they are part of one another's 
combinatorial formula.  (If you go on in linguistics, both the concepts
of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relation will be important--for now I am 
happy if you just have some idea of what a paradigm is).

Recall that English make, German mach-, and Russian djela- 
are stems--but English make is a free morpheme, while the others 
are bound (that's why we write them with a hyphen).
     
     A basic step in morphological analysis is to try and find
forms that can be arranged in a paradigm, so that you can
associate constant elements of meaning ('make') with constant
elements of form (make, mach-, dyel-), and (ideally) 
find pairs of words that differ only in one element of meaning and one 
element of form.