Languages & Linguistics
Inflectional Morphemes
Inflectional morphemes are affixes added to a word to indicate grammatical information such as tense, number, case, and gender. They modify the meaning of a word without changing its basic meaning or part of speech. In English, examples of inflectional morphemes include the -s for plural nouns and the -ed for past tense verbs.
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10 Key excerpts on "Inflectional Morphemes"
- Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams, , Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Languages such as Finnish and Japanese have a dazzling array of inflectional processes for conveying everything from “temporary state of being” (Finnish nouns) to “strong negative intention” (Japanese verbs). English spoken 1,000 years ago had considerably more inflectional morphology than Modern English, as we shall discuss in Chapter 8. The differences between inflectional and derivational morphemes in Modern English are summarized in the table below and in Figure 2.1 that follows it: Inflectional Derivational Grammatical function Lexical function No word class change May cause word class change Small or no meaning change Some meaning change Often required by rules of grammar Never required by rules of grammar Follow derivational morphemes in a word Precede Inflectional Morphemes in a word Productive Some productive, many nonproductive Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Rules of Word Formation 49 The Hierarchical Structure of Words We saw earlier that morphemes are added in a fixed order. This order reflects the hierarchical structure of the word, entirely analogous to the hierarchical structure of sentences that we observed in the previous chapter. A word is not a simple sequence of morphemes just as a sentence is not a simple sequence of words. It has an internal structure. For example, the word unsystematic is com- posed of three morphemes: un-, system, and -atic. The root is system, a noun, to which we add the suffix -atic, resulting in an adjective, systematic.
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 - 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 - PDFLinguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing
100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax
- Emily M. Bender(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Springer(Publisher)
CHAPTER 2 Morphology: Introduction #7 Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language, usually consisting of a sequence of phones paired with concrete meaning. Morphology is the subfield oflinguistics concerned with the formation and internal structure of words. It encompasses morphotactics, or questions of which morphemes are allowed to combine within a word and in what order; morphophonology, how the form of morphemes is conditioned by other morphemes they combine with; and morphosyntax, how the morphemes in a word affect its combinatoric potential. 1 In all three cases, the units under consideration are morphemes, which can be defined as the smallest meaningful units oflanguage. A morpheme is typically a sequence of phones (sounds) paired with a concrete meaning. 2 A simple example is given in (6) where the boundaries between morphemes (with words) are indicated by'+': (6) Morpheme+s are the small+est mean+ing+ful unit+s oflanguage. This example, however, belies the actual complexity of morphological systems. As described be- low, both the 'form' and the 'meaning' part of the pairing can vary from the prototypes in impor- tant ways. Specifically, the form can be made up of phones which are not contiguous (#8), it can be made up of something other than phones (#9), it can in fact be null (#10), and finally the form can vary with the linguistic context (#23-#26). On the meaning side, in addition to core lexical meaning (#11), morphemes can convey changes to that meaning (#12) (which furthermore can be idiosyncratic (#13)) and/or syntactically or semantically relevant features (#14, #28-#43) #8 The phones making up a morpheme don't have to be contiguous. While prototypical morphemes are sequences of phones (sounds, represented by letters in alphabetic writing systems) which furthermore have easily identified boundaries between them, there are several ways in which morphemes can depart from this prototypical case.
eBook - PDF- Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan, Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Particular inflectional forms of words may be required by the syntactic context, i.e. they are deter-mined by agreement or rection (i.e. govern-ment ). This is what is called contextual inflec-tion in Booij (1994). Typical examples are agreement in number and person between subject and finite verb, and the selection of particular case forms of nouns by verbs and prepositions. Note, however, that not all in-flection is dependent on syntax. For instance, the number of a noun in subject position is not determined by syntactic context, but is a matter of free choice by the speaker. That is, there is also inherent inflection (e.g. number of nouns, tense, aspect, comparatives, and superlatives), which is closer to derivation than contextual inflection. The distinction between inherent and contextual inflection is reflected by the fact that inherent inflection tends to be more idiosyncratic than contex-tual inflection (lexical split, defective para-digms, forms without base words, etc., cf. Booij 1994). This difference between inherent and contextual inflection has also been observed by Kurylowicz who distinguished between in-flectional categories with a primarily syntac-tic function such as case and inflectional cate-gories with a primarily semantic or autono-mous function. He pointed out that number is “a semantic trait of the noun” (Kurylowicz 1964: 31), and that “degrees of comparison […] represent the autonomous inflection of the adjective. This inflection is intrinsically semantic and never assumes a special syntac-tic function” (Kurylowicz 1964: 34). The criterion that syntactically relevant morphology is inflection is not so easy to ap-ply in all cases. Note that derivation is also relevant to syntax in that it often determines the syntactic category and the syntactic va-lency of the words it creates. For instance, the Dutch prefix be-creates transitive verbs from verbs and nouns. The transitivity effect shows that be-prefixation is syntactically rele-vant.
- Jan Don(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
It could be the case that the observed dif-ferences are epiphenomenal, that is, that these differences follow from another property and that in principle the two make use of the same linguistic mechanisms. 72 MORPHOLOGICAL THEORY AND THE MORPHOLOGY OF ENGLISH 3.3 Inflection in English Inflection is category-specific. That is, the inflection in verbs is sensitive to different morphosyntactic categories from those nominal inflection is sensitive to, and the form it takes is different in both categories. In fact, the origin of separating different word-classes such as nouns and verbs lies in their different behaviour with respect to inflection. First, we will look into nominal inflection. English has almost no nominal inflection as compared to many of the world’s languages. To compare, English has no case system, that is, the form of a noun (apart from its number marking) is always the same whatever the syntactic context may be. In a language such as Finnish, the form of a noun is dependent upon the syntactic context in which it occurs, and the noun may take one of fourteen different forms. Even one of the closest neigh-bours of English, German, has different inflectional forms of nouns. The form of a noun in these languages is partly dependent upon its ‘case’. This case is determined by the syntactic function of the phrase of which the case-marked noun is the head. ‘Case’ is thus a morphosyntactic category, just like ‘person’ or ‘number’, but a morphosyntactic category that English altogether lacks. Similarly, where other West Germanic languages such as Dutch, Frisian and German have a gender system, English does not. In German each noun belongs to one of three ‘gender classes’: a noun is either mas-culine, feminine or neuter. Standard Dutch has a two-gender system: nouns belong either to the class of neuter or to the class of non-neuter nouns.
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 - 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.
No longer available |Learn more- Celia Kerslake, Aslı Göksel(Authors)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
With the exception of anti-, which has some degree of productivity, these prefixes occur only with loan words. Most of the words thus formed are stressed on the (first syllable of the) prefix. 8 INFLECTIONAL SUFFIXES Inflectional suffixes indicate how the constituents of a sentence relate to each other, and express functional relations such as case, person and tense . In this chapter a description of the forms and attachment properties of these suffixes is provided; for the meaning and usage of each suffix, the reader is referred to the relevant chapters in Part 3 . In section 8.1 we discuss the inflectional suffixes that attach to nominals, and in section 8.2 those that attach to verbs. Sections 8.3 and 8.4 focus on the copular markers and person markers, both of which can attach to nominals and to verbs. Section 8.5 explains the attachment properties of suffixes that form subordinate clauses. 8.1 NOMINAL INFLECTIONAL SUFFIXES The suffixes that attach to nominals are those marking number, possession and case. The only number suffix is the plural suffix -lAr . The possessive suffixes indicate the person of the possessor. The order in which nominal inflectional suffixes appear on the stem is number-possession-case (see 14.3.1.2 (38) for an exception): (1) çocuk -lar -ı n -a child -PL -2SG.POSS -DAT NUMBER POSSESSION CASE ‘to your children’ These forms can further be combined with the copular markers ( 8.3.2 ), -DIr ( 8.3.3 ) and person markers ( 8.4 ) to form predicates ( 12.1.1.2 ): (2) Ev -ler -imiz -de -ymi ş -ler. home -PL -1PL.POSS -LOC -EV.COP -3PL ‘Apparently they are/were at our homes.’ 8.1.1 THE PLURAL SUFFIX -lAr The suffix -lAr ( 14.3.1.1 ) is used primarily to indicate plurality: köpek ler ‘dogs’, sul ar ‘[glasses, etc. of] water’, ş un lar ‘these’, sar ı lar ‘the yellow [ones’]; see 14.3.1.2 for other functions.
eBook - PDF- Shobhana Lakshmi Chelliah(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
In Meithei, the formal productivity of inflectional morphology is complemen-ted by its semantic productivity: the meanings signalled by the inflectional morphology are regular, easier to predict than the meanings signalled by the derivational morphemes which are often idiosyncratic. It is generally also expected (Greenberg 1966) that derivational morphology occurs encompassed within inflectional morphology, so that derivational mor-phology occurs closer to the root than inflectional morphology. Corresponding to this in Meithei, the three categories which occur closest to the root have been called derivational, and the fourth category farther out from the root, inflectional. 204 Chapter 7. Affixal morphology Finally, it has been noted that the phonology closer to the root (the phonolo-gy of derivational morphology) is less regular than the phonology further out from the root (the phonology of inflectional morphology) (Sapir 1921). More specifically, it has been observed that the phonological rules which apply on derivational morphology have a more restricted environment of application than phonological rules that apply on the inflectional morphology (Kiparsky 1982). This is certainly true in Meithei where the categories of first, second and third level derivational suffixes undergo lexical phonological rules and the affixes in the inflectional category undergo only post-lexical rules (see Chapter 2 for details). It has been noted that derivational morphology has a tendency to consist of borrowed or lexicalized forms (Bybee 1985). In Meithei, suffixes from first, second and third level derivation have a diachronic relationship with a stem in the language; that is, the suffix has been derived from the stem (see the right hand column in Table 3). In this process of grammaticalization, the stem loses its stem tone and the vowel of the stem may appear as s.
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