What morphological unit shows tense or comparison in words?

Inflectional morphemes are the morphological units that indicate grammatical functions such as tense, number, or comparison in words. They modify a base word to express various grammatical categories without changing the core meaning of the word. For instance, in English, the addition of "-ed" to a verb signifies past tense, while "-s" to a noun indicates plural form.

This category of morphemes is distinct because they apply inflections to express different grammatical aspects rather than creating entirely new words, as is the function of some other morphemes. While free morphemes can stand alone as words and bound morphemes require attachment to a free morpheme, and prefixes are a specific type of bound morpheme often used to alter meanings or create new words, it is the inflectional morphemes that specifically denote tense or comparison, such as changing "big" to "bigger" or "run" to "ran."

Thus, the characterization of tense or comparison directly aligns with the function of inflectional morphemes in altering the grammatical state of a word.