Languages & Linguistics
Inflection
Inflection refers to the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, number, gender, and case. In languages with inflectional morphology, words change their form to convey these grammatical distinctions. Inflection can occur through the addition of suffixes, prefixes, or changes in the root of the word.
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10 Key excerpts on "Inflection"
eBook - PDF- Rochelle Lieber(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
In this chapter you will learn about Inflection, the sort of morphology that expresses grammatical distinctions. ◆ ◆ We will look at a wide variety of types of Inflection, including number, person, gender and noun class, case, tense and aspect, voice, mood and modality. ◆ ◆ We will learn what morphologists mean by a ‘paradigm’ and look at patterns within paradigms. ◆ ◆ And we will consider whether it is always clear where to draw the line between Inflection and derivation. KEY TERMS person number gender case tense aspect inherent contextual paradigm evidentiality mirativity CHAPTER OUTLINE Inflection 6 CHAPTER 106 6 Inflection 6.1 Introduction At the outset of this book we divided morphology into two domains: Inflectional and derivational word formation. In the last three chap- ters, we have concentrated on derivational word formation – types of word formation that create new lexemes. In this chapter, we turn our attention to Inflectional word formation. Inflection refers to word formation that does not change category and does not create new lexemes, but rather changes the form of lexemes so that they fit into different grammatical contexts. As we’ll see in detail below, grammatical meaning can include information about number (sin- gular vs. plural), person (first, second, third), tense (past, present, future), and other distinctions as well. In this chapter, we will first survey different forms of Inflection that can be found both in English and in the languages of the world, and then look at the ways in which Inflection can work. A word before we start though. We’ve seen that new lexemes can be derived using all sorts of different formal processes of word formation: affixation, compounding, conversion, internal stem change, redupli- cation, templatic morphology, and so on. Inflectional word formation makes use of almost all of these types of word formation rules as well, with the possible exceptions of compounding and subtractive processes.
eBook - PDFWord Knowledge and Word Usage
A Cross-Disciplinary Guide to the Mental Lexicon
- Vito Pirrelli, Ingo Plag, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Vito Pirrelli, Ingo Plag, Wolfgang U. Dressler(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Claudia Marzi, James P. Blevins, Geert Booij and Vito Pirrelli Inflection at the morphology-syntax interface Abstract: What is Inflection? Is it part of language morphology, syntax or both? What are the basic units of Inflection and how do speakers acquire and process them? How do they vary across languages? Are some Inflection systems some-what more complex than others, and does Inflectional complexity affect the way speakers process words? This chapter addresses these and other related issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. Our main goal is to map out the place of Inflection in our current understanding of the grammar architecture. In doing that, we will embark on an interdisciplinary tour, which will touch upon theoreti-cal, psychological, typological, historical and computational issues in morphol-ogy, with a view to looking for points of methodological and substantial convergence from a rather heterogeneous array of scientific approaches and the-oretical perspectives. The main upshot is that we can learn more from this than just an additive medley of domain-specific results. In the end, a cross-domain survey can help us look at traditional issues in a surprisingly novel light. Keywords: Inflection, paradigmatic relations, word processing, word learning, Inflectional complexity, family size, entropy 1 The problem of Inflection Inflection is the morphological marking of morphosyntactic and morphosemantic information like case, number, person, tense and aspect (among others) on words. For instance, a word may be specified as singular for the grammatical cat-egory of number, i.e. it has a certain value for the feature ‘ number ’ . The feature ‘ number ’ has two values in English: singular and plural. The choice of specific values for such features may depend on syntactic context or semantic context. Claudia Marzi, Vito Pirrelli, Italian National Research Council (CNR), Institute for Computational Linguistics, Pisa, Italy James P.
eBook - PDF- Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan, Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
IX. Flexion Inflection 62. Lexeme, word-form, paradigm 1. The scope of Inflection 2. Definitions: word-form, grammatical word, lexeme 3. Paradigm 4. The external delimitation of paradigms 5. The internal structure of paradigms 6. Stems 7. References 1. The scope of Inflection Inflection is concerned with sets of word-forms which have the same lexical meaning but different grammatical (or morphosyntac-tic) properties. These grammatical differences usually involve syntactic relationships of gov-ernment or concord between word-forms in the same sentence (cf. Art. 34). In this way, Inflection is distinguished from derivation , which concerns related word-forms which have different lexical meanings (cf. Art. 38). For example, in the German sentence Meine junge Schwester liebt deinen jungen Bruder ‘my young sister loves your young brother’, the word-forms junge and jungen both belong to the lexeme jung ‘young’, their differences in form being due to the grammatical proper-ties in this context of the words Schwester, liebt and Bruder . Some languages (e.g. Viet-namese) are said to display no Inflection at all, so that there is only one word-form corre-sponding to each lexeme; on the other hand, some languages have lavish Inflectional sys-tems, in which one lexeme typically encom-passes dozens or even hundreds of word-forms. The main theoretical questions raised by such system are: (a) How do we determine which word-forms belong to a given lexeme (see 4)? (b) To what extent do the relevant grammati-cal properties and their expressions im-pose an organisation on the word-forms within a given lexeme (see 5)? Neither of these questions has a clear-cut an-swer accepted by all morphologists, but one can try at least to identify the problems which stand in the way of clear-cut answers. As a first step, some important terms need to be defined.
eBook - ePubThe Study of Words
An Introduction
- Lewis Gebhardt(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_conjugation . All these distinctions need not delay us here, but it’s important to point out that Latin verb paradigms are quite complex compared to paradigms in English.Inflectional morphology is the grammar of generating the various forms of words with their meanings and particular grammatical functions from roots (Stump 1998 , 13–14). For the verb cantō above, the root is √CANT. To begin wordformation, the root becomes the verbal stem cant-, which then combines with the Inflectional suffix -ō for the first-person singular present, the result being the wordform cantō, meaning ‘I sing’. We can analyze the first-person plural Inflection as -āmus to get the wordform for ‘we sing’.The number of inflected forms of a word can be as small as a single form or vast, with thousands of possible forms, depending on the language and the part of speech. This chapter takes a look at Inflectional morphology across languages.4.2 Formation of Wordforms
The richness of a paradigm depends on the Inflectional resources of the language. Some languages, such as Latin, Crow and Cree, have lots of Inflectional morphology, while languages such as Vietnamese have very little if any Inflectional morphology. In terms of Inflectional morphology, English sits toward the lower end of the scale, with a middling number of Inflections for verbs and nouns and adjectives.Similar to a paradigm is the concept of a lexeme, the collection of the inflected forms of a word and their meanings. Each particular form in a lexeme is a wordform, a single word comprising the simple stem and Inflection(s): sing, sang, sung are three of the wordforms for the verb sing. As a convenience, we’ll use the root sign and capital letters to designate both a root and a lexeme. Thus, we say that sing, sang, sung
eBook - PDF- Ingo Plag(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Inflectional morphology, on the other hand, involves features such as Case or Num-ber which are present either as a consequence of the word being inserted into a syntactic construction (Case) or because of syntactic agreement with an item bearing that feature (e.g., Number agreement of the verb with its subject). This is the Split Morphology Hy-pothesis - viz. derivation in the lexicon, Inflection in syntax - upheld in particular by Anderson (1982, 1992). Booij (1993) argues against it on the ground that two types of Inflection must be distin-guished: contextual Inflection such as structural Case which indeed depends on syntactic context, and inherent Inflection such as Tense which does not, and inherent Inflection may feed derivation, so it cannot be ordered after it. Yet, the distinction between contextual and inherent Inflection is not so clear-cut as Booij would have it. For instance, although Tense certainly is inherent, it is well-known that in a number of languages, e.g. Hindi, the Case born by the subject varies according to the value of Tense, showing that Tense must at least be accessible in syntax. I am not aware that such dependencies obtain with respect to pro-totypical instances of derivation. 4 Even there, borderline cases are not unknown. Agentive derivation in English (e.g., swim > swimmer) has no syntactic correlate beyond category changing. Not so in Bantu and related languages, however, where noun class marking has clearly derivational functions (see Mufwene 1980; Kihm to appear a), nevertheless induc-ing syntactic agreement. 5 What such facts suggest is that the distinction between Inflection and derivation is clearly a matter of degree as argued by Bybee (1985), but the distinction of contextual and inherent Inflection is not really helpful, and there still is a global contrast 4 Imagine a language where the subject of write would bear a different Case from the subject of rewrite or underwrite.
eBook - PDF- Olga Akhmanova(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Taxonomies of this kind are 'ethno-centric' and are useless in the quest for linguistic universals. Of great interest are comparative-historical investigations which show that there are no distinct lines between derivation and inflexion from a diachronic point of view. In the history of language there are constant transitions from the former into the latter. (Very interesting illustrations are found in J. Kurytowicz, On the Meth-ods of Internal Reconstruction, Proc. of the 9th Intern. Congr. of Linguists, 17). 3.2.3 Inflectional Morphemes and Morphology in the Narrow Sense The 'lexical' (or 'root-', 'source-') morphemes are like words in many respects. They are endowed, to a greater or less degree, with the power of individual reference. They are often polyseman-tic, in a lexical sense. It is true, that derivational morphemes do not possess these qualities in the same marked degree, that many of them are on the border-line between lexical and grammatical morphology. Nevertheless (as will be shown later) it is not only possible, but also necessary to distinguish between derivational and inflexional morphemes as a matter of principle. A more detailed discussion of the field with its specific problems 102 MORPHOLOGY should be preceded by some metalinguistic clarification. First of all the term 'grammatical' which is a complex bundle of concepts : (1) expressing relationship; (2) systemic, standard, recurring; (3) auxiliary, concomitant in form. It follows that grammatical mor-phology deals with units (and processes?) (1) connected with the expression of relations between objects; (2) connected with rela-tions, expressed by means of regular, standard recurrent devices; and (3) auxiliary, concomitant subservient with respect to the 'material' (vescestvennoj) or 'lexical' part of words. The morphonological processes of lexical morphology are com-paratively speaking simple, even for most of the phenomena of derivation.
eBook - PDFEnglish Words and Sentences
An Introduction
- Eva Duran Eppler, Gabriel Ozón(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
CHAPTER 4 Inflectional morphology This chapter . . . This chapter starts with a comparison of derivational and Inflectional morphology. We will then deal with principles of Inflectional morphology, morphology that reflects grammatical (i.e. relational) information. We will focus on the grammatical categories number, tense and agreement, concepts that are important in the English language. We will see that today’s English has little Inflectional morphology in comparison with earlier versions of English and other languages. We are going to illustrate this with examples from Shakespeare’s English, Russian, German and Nez Perce. We will introduce some of the ways in which morphology is related to syntax and demonstrate this in the activities and the exercises at the end of the chapter. This provides a natural transition to the topic of syntax which we are going to examine in the rest of the book. 4.1 Differences between derivation and Inflection page 61 4.2 Inflectional morphology on nouns: number 70 4.3 Inflectional morphology on verbs 71 4.4 Agreement 75 4.5 Morphology in other languages and morphological glossing 76 4.6 Chapter summary 77 Key terms, Exercises and Further reading 78 In the last chapter we revisited the concept of morpheme (first introduced in Chapter 1) and refined it by looking at different ways of classifying morphemes: free and bound; root; base; affix; prefix; and suffix. This chapter will concen- trate on Inflectional morphology, and as a way of checking that you are familiar with the morphological concepts we also need in this chapter, do Activity 4.1. Activity 4.1 First write brief definitions of the following morphological key terminology, and give at least one example for each. Then state the difference between two contrasting terms. 60 Now run a quick check over your answers by consulting the Glossary at the end of this book. If the content of your definitions matches those in the glossary, we can move on.
eBook - PDF- Alexander Tokar(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
6 Inflectional morphology Having discussed both the lex- and lexeme-building mechanisms, we can finally proceed to wordform-building mechanisms, i.e. mechanisms like Inflectional affixation producing output allolexes which express different grammatical meanings than corresponding input lexes (e.g. talked and talk, books and book, prettier and pretty). The chapter has the following structure. Section 6.1 provides a more precise definition of the term 'grammatical category', which was already introduced in 1.1. Section 6.2 classifies grammatical categories into syntactic and semantic grammemes. Section 6.3 introduces all wordform- building mechanisms with the help of which speakers of English create wordforms like talked, books, prettier, etc. Finally, Sections 6.4 and 6.5 dwell on the most important theoretical issues pertaining to both syntactic and semantic grammemes in English. 6.1 Grammatical category A grammatical category is the set of mutually exclusive grammatical meanings such as, for example, 'the singular number' and 'the plural number' (forming the grammatical category NUMBER) or 'the present tense' and 'the past tense' (forming the grammatical category TENSE). To explain what is meant by the 'mutual exclusiveness' of grammatical meanings , let us recall what we said about the contrast between the past tense meaning inherent in the Inflectional suffix -ed of e.g. talked, walked, worked and the past time meaning inherent in the derivational prefix ex- of e.g. ex- ambassador, ex-boyfriend, ex-president: while the latter is an optional lexical meaning that is expressed only when we want to specifically refer to people who are former ambassadors, boyfriends, and presidents, the former is an obligatory grammatical meaning, i.e.
eBook - PDFLinguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing
100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax
- Emily M. Bender(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Springer(Publisher)
Furthermore, given the existence of nearly perfectly isolating languages (see #20), anything that can be expressed morphologically in some language is likely to be expressed via periphrastic means (i.e., through a string of separate words) in some other language. 1 #29--#37 briefly explain and illustrate a range of types of information that are marked mor- phologically in some languages. #38--#41 explore the phenomenon of agreement whereby the Inflection of one word in the sentence depends on the morphosyntactic properties of another. Finally, #42 and #43 conclude the chapter with some reflections on cross-linguistic variation in morphosyntax. 1 This is not necessarily always true, however: Languages vary in which aspects of meaning are 'grammaticalized' in the sense of being expressed through a particular function morpheme, either affix or independent word. This means that it is logically possible for something to be grammaticalized as an affix certain languages and not grammaticalized at all in the more isolating languages. 36 4. MORPHOSYNTAX #29 Morphological features associated with verbs and adjectives (and sometimes nouns) can include information about tense, aspect and mood. Tense, aspect and mood are three frequently grammaticalized properties of events which are commonly expressed via Inflection on verbs. Comrie [1985] defines tense as "grammaticalized location in time" and aspect as "grammaticalization of expression ofinternal temporal consistency" (p. 9). Thus tense has to do with the location of the event being referred to with respect to time (utterance time or some other reference time, see Reichenbach 1947), whereas aspect relates to the way the event itself takes place over time. For example, the past tense in (31a) shows that the event being described took place in the past.
- Jan Don(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
A rule always leaves the non-focus part unchanged. Furthermore, it may also explain why certain patterns recur. There is a limited set of rules and verbs may undergo one or more rules, thus leading to subclasses and subsubclasses. However, it also seems beyond the rules to account for the fact that similar stem-forms in terms of their phonemic make-up tend to undergo the same rules. For example, even in the rule account there is no explanation for the fact that verbs ending in - ing are particularly prone to the pattern - ang , -ung . The proper treatment of the morphology of the English past tense InflectionAL MORPHOLOGY 85 has given rise to a long and wide-ranging discussion among cognitive scientists from different strands of research. We will come back to this discussion and the issues briefly touched upon above in Chapter 6. 3.4 The problem of underdetermination There is a great variety of theories on morphological Inflection that result from an ongoing theoretical discussion about the proper treat-ment of Inflectional phenomena. In order to give some insight into this complex debate, we will organise our presentation around two central questions. Both questions have a long history in the field, which we are unable to sketch in just a few paragraphs; rather we will try to present the issues in such a way that, after having read this chapter, one can fruitfully read current contributions to this field of inquiry. The first question is whether Inflectional morphology should be dealt with in the lexicon or in the syntax. The second, to which we will turn in Section 3.5, concerns the question of whether Inflectional morphology always involves affixation, or whether other operations are also possible instances of Inflection. The model of the grammar that is generally accepted by generative grammarians can be depicted as follows: (31) Lexicon Syntax PF LF The lexicon contains the basic elements for the construction of sen-tences.
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