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In linguistics, 'periphrasis' is a device by which a grammatical concept is expressed by more than one word (typically one or more function words modifying a content word), instead of being shown by inflection or derivation. For example, the English future tense is periphrastic: it is formed with an auxiliary verb (''shall'' or ''will'') followed by the base form of the main verb. Another example is the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives, when they are formed with the words ''more'' and ''most'' rather than with the suffixes ''-er'' and ''-est'': the forms ''more beautiful'' and ''most beautiful'' are periphrastic, while ''lovelier'' and ''loveliest'' are not.^[1]
Periphrasis is a characteristic of analytic languages, which tend to avoid inflection. Even synthetic languages, which are highly inflected, sometimes make use of periphrasis to fill out an inflectional paradigm that is missing certain forms.^[2]
A comparison of some Latin forms with their English translations shows that English uses periphrasis in many instances where Latin uses inflection:

Latin (inflected)	English (periphrastic)
stēllae	of a star
patientissimus	most patient
amāberis	you will be loved

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References

References

1. A Student's Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, , R. L., Trask, Arnold, 1997, ISBN 0-340-65266-7
2. The Handbook of Morphology, , Gregory T., Stump, Blackwell, 1998, ISBN 0-631-18544-5