If you’ve ever studied a foreign language – French, Latin, German, Russian – you probably know at least intuitively what a paradigm is. A paradigm consists of all of the different inflectional forms of a particular lexeme or class of lexemes. Each distinct form of a lexeme exhibits a specific combination of the inflectional properties that are expressed in that language. For convenience, you can think of a paradigm as a kind of table or grid with cells, one for each inflected form for a given lexeme. For example, in (31) and (33) above, I’ve shown you paradigms for the Old English nouns ‘stone’, ‘gift’, and ‘ship’, and for the verbs ‘to drive’ and ‘to judge’; these paradigms show the various endings and stem changes that are exhibited by nouns of different genders in the singular and plural in different cases, and in the present and past of strong and weak verbs in different persons. Traditionally the paradigm of a noun or adjective was called its declension and that of a verb its conjugation.