Inflectional morphology is a part of the study of linguistics.
To apply an inflection is to change the form of a word so as to give it extra meaning. This extra meaning could be:
Number
Person
Case
Gender
Tense
Mood
Aspect
Politeness (as in the Japanese language)
Inflectional morphology manifests primarily in the form of a prefix, suffix, or vowel change. Circumfixes and infixes can also occur, but these are relatively rare.
An example of suffixes in inflectional morphology:
"I have an apple" - apple singular
"I have apples" - apples plural
The word apples differs from apple only in the sense that the former indicates more than one fruit. This distinction is mandatory in English, optional in Korean, and impossible in Japanese. Yet other languages require the speaker to distinguish the number two of something, called the dual form of a noun. Forms for higher numbers, such a trial and paucal have also been recognized.
An example of vowel changes in inflectional morphology:
A root is the irreducible core of a Word, with absolutely nothing else attached to it. It is the part that is always present, possibly with some modification, in the various manifestations of a lexeme. For example, walk is a root and it a appears in the set of word-forms that instantiate the lexeme WALK such as walk, walks, walking and walked.
The only situation where this is not true is when suppletion takes place. In that case, word-forms that represent the same morpheme do not share a common root morpheme. Thus, although both the word –forms good and better realise the lexeme GOOD, only good is phonetically similar to GOOD.
Many words contain a root standing on its own. Roots which are capable of standing independently are called free morphemes, for example:
Free morphemes
Man book tea sweet cook
Bet very aardvark pain walk
AFIXES
An affix is a morpheme which only occurs when attached to some other morpheme such as a root or stem or base. Obviously, by definition affixes are bound morphemes. No word may contain only an affix standing on its own, like *-s or * -al or even a number of affixes strung together like *-al-s.
There are three types of affixes. We will consider them in turn.
PREFIXES
A prefix is an affix attached before a root or stem or base like re-, un- and in-.
Re-make un-kind in-decnt
Re-read un-tidy in-accurate
SUFFIXES
A suffix is an affix attached aftera root (or stem base) like –ly, -er, ist, -s, -ing and –ed.
Kind-ly wait-er book-s walk-ed jump-ed
Quick-ly play-er mat-s jump-ed
INFIXES
An infix is an affix inserted into the root itself. Infixes are very common in Semitic language like Arabic and Hebrew. But infixing is somewhere rare in English. Sloat and Taylor (1978) suggest that the only infix that occurs in English morphology is /-n-/ which is inserted before the last consonant of the root in a few words of Latin origin, on what appears to be an arbitrary basis.
This infix undergoes place of articulation assimilation. Thus, the root –cub- meaning “lie in, on or upon” occurs without [m] before the [b] in some words containing that root, e.g. incubate, incubus, concubine and succubus. But [m] is infixed before that same root in some other words like incumbent, succumb, and decumbent. This infix is a frozen historical relic from Latin.
In fact, infixation of sorts still happens in contemporary English. Example.
a.Kalamazu (places name) → Kalama-goddam-zoo
Instantiate (verb) → in-fuckin-stantiate
b.Kangaroo → kanga-bloody-roo
Impossible → in-fuckin-possible
Guarantee → guaran-friggin-tee
(Recall that the arrow → means “becomes” or is “re-written as”.)
As you can see, in present-day English infixation, not of an affix morpheme but of an entire word (which may have more than one morpheme, blood-y, fuck-ing) is actively used to form words. Curiously, this infixation is virtually restricted to inserting expletives into words in expressive language that one would probably not use in polite company.
ROOTS, STEMS AND BASES
The stem is that part of a word that is in existence before any inflectional affixes (those affixes whose presence is required by the syntax such as markers of singular and plural number in nouns, tense in verbs, etc.) have been added. Inflection is discussed in section. For the moment a few examples should suffice.
Noun stem Plural
Cat -s
Worker -s
In the word-form cats, the plural inflectional suffix –s is attached to the simple stem cat, which is a bare root, the irreducible core of the word.
In workers the same inflectional -s suffix comes after a slightly more complex stem consisting of the root workplus the suffix -er which is used to the form nouns from verbs (with the meaning “someone who does the action designated by the verb (worker). Here work is the root, but worker is the stem to which -s is attached.
Finally a base is any unit whatsoever to which affixes of any kind can be added. The affixes attached to a base may be inflectional affixes selected for syntactic reasons or derivational affixes which alter the meaning or grammatical category of the base. An unadorned root like boy can be a base since it can have attached to it inflectional affixes like -s to form the plural boys or derivational affixes like -ish to turn the noun boy into the adjective boyish. In other words, all roots are bases. Bases are called stems only in the context of inflectional morphology.
STEM EXTENDERS
In the last chapter we saw that languages sometimes have word-building elements that are devoid of content. Such empty formatives are often referred to, somewhat inappropriately, as empty morphs.
In English empty formatives are interposed between the root, base or stem and an affix. For instance, while the irregular plural allomorph -en is attached directly to the stem oxto form ox-en,in the formationof chil-r-nenand breth-r-en it can only be added after the stem has been extended by attaching -r-to child-and breth-.Hence, the name stem extender for this type of formative.
The use of stem extenders may not be entirely arbitrary. There may be a good historical reason for the use of particular stem extenders before certain affixes. To some extent, current word-formation rules reflect the history of the language.
The history of stem extender -r-is instructive. A small number of nouns in Old English formed their plural by adding –er.The word “child” was cild in the singular and cilderin the plural (a form that has survived in some conservative North of England dialects, and is spelled childer). But later, -en was added as an additional plural ending. Eventually -er lost its value as a marker of plural and it simply became a stem extender:
SingularPluralNew SingularPlural
Cild “child” cild-er cilder cilder-en
Thistopicisveryinterestingbutalsoverycomplicatedand we considerthepartofmorphemes,suffixesandaffixesisthemostimportantmorphology.
A morpheme may consist of a word, such as hand, or a meaningful piece of a word, such as the -ed of looked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. Some morphemes have no concrete form or no continuous form, as we will see, and some do not have meanings in the conventional sense of the term.
You may also run across the term morph. The term ‘morph’ is sometimes used to refer specifically to the phonological realization of a morpheme. For example, the English past tense morpheme that we spell -ed has various morphs. It is realized as [t] after the voiceless [p] of jump (cf. jumped), as [d] after the voiced [l] of repel (cf. repelled), and as [d] after the voiceless [t] of root or the voiced [d] of wed (cf. rooted and wedded).
We can also call these morphs allomorphs or variants. The appearance of one morph over another in this case is determined by voicing and the place of articulation of the final consonant of the verb stem. It is important to take very seriously the idea that the grammatical function of a morpheme, which may include its meaning, must be constant.
Consider the English words lovely and quickly. They both end with the suffix -ly. But is it the same in both words? No – when we add -ly to the adjective quick, we create an adverb that describes how fast someone does something. But when we add -ly to the noun love, we create an adjective. What on the surface appears to be a single morpheme turns out to be two. One attaches to adjectives and creates adverbs; the other attaches to nouns and creates adjectives.
There are two other sorts of affixes that you will encounter, infixes and circumfixes. Both are classic challenges to the notion of morpheme. Infixes are segmental strings that do not attach to the front or back of a word, but rather somewhere in the middle.
The Tagalog infix -um- is illustrated below (McCarthy and Prince 1993: 101–5; French 1988). It creates an agent from a verb stem and appears before the first vowel of the word:
What is inflection? The standard intuition among linguists is that inflectional morphology is concerned whit syntactically driven word-formation. Inflectional morphology deals with syntactically determined affixation processes while derivational morphology is used to create new lexical items.
In practice, however, there is not always unanimity in the classification off processes as inflectional or derivational. Grammarians working on the same language may not agree as to which processes are to be treated as inflectional and which ones are to be regarded as derivational. Across languages there can be even greater confusion. As we shall see shortly, a process classified as inflectional in one language may be analogous to a process regarded as derivational in another. Clearly, there is a need for a principled way of determining whether a given process is inflectional or derivational. Below we will examine ways in which that need might be met.
Differentiating between Inflection and Derivation
In this subsection I outline a number of criteria that have been proposed in order to put the dichotomy between inflection and derivation on a firmer theoretical footing. This is important since much morphological theorizing is based on the assumption that morphological processes fall into two broad categories: inflection and derivation.
Obligatoriness
Greenberg (1954) proposed the criterion of obligatoriness to characterize inflection. He argued that inflection occurs when, at different points in a sentence, syntax imposes obligatory choices from a menu of affixes. If the right choice is not made, an ungrammatical sentence results.
This can be seen from the behavior of the inflectional category of number in demonstrative in English. The demonstrative must always have the same number category as the noun it modifies, as seen:
a
Dsing Nsing
Dplur Nplur
b
Dplur Nsing
Dsing Nplur
this book
these books
*these book
*this books
that book
those books
*those book
*that books
If the demonstrative has a different marking for number from that of the noun it modifies the result is ungrammatical.
According to Greenberg, no such obligatoriness exists in the case of derivation. Syntax per se does not force the choice of a specific derivationally derived lexical item in order to ensure that ungrammaticality is avoided. To take a simple example, an English noun does not have to be affixed with –er in any syntactic position. Hence er-is a derivational suffix.
A subject NP need not contain a noun with the agentive nominaliser –er. All kinds of nouns which do not have that suffix can freely substitute for each other as subject NPs without affecting grammatical well-formedness:
A
The farmer is in the barn
b
The cow is in the barn
The teacher is in the barn
The pig is the barn
The baker is in barn
The man in is the barn
By contrast, where, as in Latin, a noun does have to be affixed with a particular suffix when it is in a subject or object NP etc. the suffixation is inflectional. Contrast Agricola[SUBj] videt ‘The farmer sees’ Agricolam[OBJ] videt ‘He sees the farmer’.
Unfortunately the criterion of obligatoriness cannot always successfully distinguish between inflection and derivation. There are cases where syntactic well- formedness requires the selection of a form with a particular derivational suffix. Compare the following:
A
I opened it awkwardly
b
The teacher is in the office
I opened it awkward
The teach is in the office
To get a well-formed sentence in [10.3a] we must apply the derivational rule that suffixes –ly to the adjective awkward and turns it into the adverb awkwardly. Similarly, in the italicized noun phrase is ill-formed unless a derived noun (with the –er suffix) appears after the determiner.
Evidently, such transcategorial derivation is a problem for a definition of inflection in terms of syntactic obligatoriness. The use of the words teacher and of awkwardly, which are formed by derivation (rather than teach and awkward), is essential in order to ensure grammaticality.
Nonetheless, the claim that some affixes are syntactically more pertinent than others is well-founded. Furthermore, the more syntactically pertinent affixes tend to be the ones that are obligatory. Thus, for example, inflectional -s in verbs, which realizes the syntactically pertinent properties of third person, present tense and singular number, is obligatory. But the derivational prefix ex-, as in ex-wife, which in not syntactically pertinent, is not obligatory in nouns appearing in any sentence position. We will return to this important issue of the correlation between obligatoriness and syntactic pertinence in below.
Productivity
Productivity (or generality) is another property that is often said to distinguish inflection from derivation. It is claimed that derivational processes tend to be sporadic while inflectional processes tend to apply automatically across the board to forms belonging to the appropriate paradigm.
A good illustration of this is tense marking in verbs. Every verb in English takes the inflectional category of past tense (usually realized as –ed). By contrast, it is very much a hit or miss affair whether a verb will take the -ant derivational agentive nominal forming suffix. We have apply ~applicant but not donate ~ donant .
Unfortunately, the generality criterion often runs into trouble because (i) there exist exception-ridden inflectional processes (such as the suffixation of the English adverb-forming -ly suffix, as in quick –ly , to adjectives to from adverbs) which are every bit as predictable as any inflectional process, and (ii) there exist exception-ridden inflectional processes.
The Russian verb system illustrates the latter problem in a very striking way. Halle reports that about 100 Russian verbs belonging to the so-called inflectional second-conjugation are defective. See the discussion of conjugat. For no apparent reason, these verbs lack first person
person singular present tense forms as you can see from this selected list:
