Final answer:
The statement that inflections change the grammatical meaning of prefixes, suffixes, and root words is false. Inflections modify the form of a word to indicate grammatical categories, while prefixes and suffixes alter the meaning of the root or stem and are not inflections.
Step-by-step explanation:
The statement 'Inflections change the grammatical meaning of prefixes, suffixes, and root words' is false. Inflections primarily affect the form of words to express different grammatical categories such as tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, and case. Prefixes and suffixes, on the other hand, are used to modify the meaning of the root or stem of a word but do not necessarily reflect grammatical inflection. Inflections typically occur through the addition of a inflectional suffix or ending to the word's stem or root.
For example, in the word 'hurries', the suffix '-es' is an inflection that changes the singular noun 'hurry' into its plural form 'hurries', indicating a grammatical change in number. When considering prefixes such as 'dis-', 're-', 'un-', etc., they modify the meaning of the root words to which they are affixed, but they are not considered inflections. Anatomical terms such as 'hypertension' illustrate how prefixes and roots combine to give a specific meaning, with 'hyper-' indicating 'high' and 'tension' relating to pressure, yet this is not an instance of inflection.
Moreover, when dealing with bound bases and prefixes, like in 'disgestion' where 'palatalization' causes the 't' to represent the [ch] sound, and 'adventureous', where 'ad-' assimilates to 'advent-' forming 'adventureous', we observe morphological changes rather than inflectional changes.