INFLECTION AND DERIVATION

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:

	*lazu	‘I climb’
	*pobezu (or pobezdu)	‘I conquer’
	*derzu	‘I talk rudely’
	*mucu	‘I stir up’
	*erunzu	‘I behave foolishly’

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

MODERN LINGUISTICS

MORPHOLOGY

FRANCIS KATAMBA

EDITORS: PALGRAVE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflectional_morphology