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Inflectional Morphology

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1. What Is Inflectional Morphology?

The word inflection comes from traditional Latin grammar. Its root flect which we see in the English word flex means bend. So simply it means altering the shape of a word so it will fit in a particular position within a sentence. In most languages inflectional morphology marks relations such as person, number, case, gender, possession, tense, aspect, and mood, serving as an essential grammatical glue holding the relationships of constructions together. Yet in some languages inflectional morphology is minimal or may not exist at all.1 For the purposes of this seminar paper, we will assume that there are three kinds of morphemes: lexical, derivational, and inflectional. The behavior of these three types of morphemes can best be understood within the context of constructions. If we think of a construction as a set of slots and relations among them, the lexical morpheme is what goes in a given slot. Any accompanying derivational morpheme(s) will make whatever semantic and grammatical adjustments may be necessary to fit the lexical morpheme into a given slot. The inflectional morphemes are the relations that hold the slots together. The job of an inflectional morpheme is to tell us how a given slot (regardless of what is in it) fits with the rest of the construction. 2 Example: (1) This pianist performs in the local hall every week. (2) Mary told us that this pianist performed in the local hall every week. (3) The performance last week was particularly impressive. All these words contain a suffix: perform-s, perform-ed, and perform-ance. However, the suffixes -s and -ed are dependent on the grammatical context in a way that the suffix -ance is not. In (1), the reason why the verb perform has an -s suffix is that the
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Bybee, Joan L. and sten Dahl. 1989, The creation of tense and aspect systems in the languages of the world 2 Laura A. Janda, Inflectional Morphology

subject of the verb (the noun phrase denoting the person doing the performing) is singular (this pianist), not plural (these pianists). 3 So, we can assume that inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes to a word which indicate grammatical information. On the other hand derivational morphemes create a new word from an existing one with changing the grammatical meaning (example, changing noun to a verb: development develop). Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called inflectional languages, which is a synonym for inflected languages. Morphemes may be added in several different ways:

Affixation, or simply adding morphemes onto the word without changing the root, Reduplication, doubling all or part of a word to change its meaning, Alternation, exchanging one sound for another in the root (usually vowel sounds, as in the ablaut process found in Germanic strong verbs and the umlaut often found in nouns, among others).

Suprasegmental variations, such as of stress, pitch or tone, where no sounds are added or changed but the intonation and relative strength of each sound is altered regularly. For an example, see Initial-stress-derived noun.

Affixing includes prefixing (adding before the base), and suffixing (adding after the base), as well as the much less common infixing (inside) and circumfixing (a combination of prefix and suffix). Inflection is most typically realized by adding an inflectional morpheme (that is, affixation) to the base form (either the root or a stem).

Laura A. Janda, Inflectional Morphology

1.1. Inflectional categories The actual inflectional categories can differ quite widely across languages. The most common categories are number, gender, case, person, tense. Though some languages do not inflect for number, many languages make an obligatory inflectional distinction between singular and plural number of nouns and pronouns. Less common, is dual number, which distinguishes nouns referring to two items from those referring either to one or more than two. Dual inflection is never found in the absence of singular and plural, and when language has the category dual, it changes the meaning of the plural form more than one to more than two. We see a similar effect in English, where the dual quantifier both cases the plural quantifier all to mean more than two: a person who has two children must say both my children, not all my children The default meaning of an inflection is a basic property identifying classes, relation to deictic coordinates, or roles, of participants in the situational context of utterance. The meanings are in part conventional, that is, lexicalised and to some extent arbitrary and dependent on the properties of lexical items. Gender is less common than number and more varied. Because of the connection of the English word gender to biological sex and because genders in European languages are sex based, we tend to think that linguistic genders are always sex-based.4 Examples of inflectional categories: Person: the inflectional category in pronouns and verbs that refers to the threeway distinction between the speaker (first person), e.g., I am tall, the hearer (second person), e.g., You are tall, and someone or something else (third person), e.g., He (she, it) is tall. Number: an inflectional category in substantives and verbs that refers to the distinction between singular, e.g., the house IS big, and plural, e.g., the houses ARE big.
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Mark Aronoff, Kristen Fudeman, What is morphology?

Tense: an inflectional category in verbs which indicates distinctions in the time (present, past, future) and the aspect (progressive, perfective) of an action or state. For example, the verb phrase is looking is in the present progressive tense, that is, it indicates an action which is going on in the present; the verb phrase has looked is in the present perfective tense, that is, it indicates an action that was completed in the past. Strictly speaking, tense is only partially an inflectional category in English, since it is signaled both by independent words, e.g., forms of the verbs be and have and by endings, e.g., ing and ed. Voice: an inflectional category in verbs that refers to the distinction between active and passive. An active verb is one whose subject is viewed as performing the action it defines, e.g., John killed the tigers; a passive verb is one whose subject is viewed as undergoing the action it defines, e.g., the tigers were killed by John. Mood: An inflectional category in verbs that refers to the distinction between indicative, conditional and imperative. The indicative mood the imperative mood expresses commands (stop!). Case: an inflectional category which indicates the relationship of substantives to other words in a sentence. In English, the opposition he/him/his is a case opposition: he is used to indicate the subject (nominative case), him to indicate the object (objective or accusative case), and his to indicate the possessor (possessive or genitive). Gender: an inflectional category in substantives that refers to the tripartite distinction between masculine, feminine, and neuter. In English, only the third person singular pronouns show gender distinctions, e.g., he, she, and it; moreover, the distinction is based on sex. In other languages, e.g., German, gender is a grammatical category of substantives and bears no relationship to sex. 1.2 The form of inflectional morphemes expresses ordinary statements (he stopped); the conditional mood expresses conditions (he would stop);

In comparison with what we observe for other linguistic elements, the formal characteristics of inflectional morphemes appear disparate and diffuse. Since inflection has what might be described as a parasitic relationship with lexical items, it exercises great freedom in terms of form. The form of the lexical item can be thought of as a launching pad for the forms of associated inflectional morphemes: basically any modification of the stem will suffice. Inflectional morphemes may be segmental, consisting of affixes applied to the stem, or they may be non-segmental, involving a different modification of the stem. Both segmental and non-segmental modifications can cooperate in a single morpheme. Zero morphemes, consisting of no modifications, often play an important role. 5 2. Regular and irregular inflection Once we know that an English word is a noun denoting a kind of thing that can be counted (if the noun is pianist or cat perhaps) then we can be confident that it will have a plural form with no idiosyncrasies of meaning: it will mean simply more than one X, whatever X may be. The second reason is that, unless otherwise specified, we can be confident that the plural form of any countable noun will be formed by adding to the singular form the suffix -s (or rather, the appropriate allomorph of this suffix); in other words, suffixing -s is the regular method of forming plurals. Many nouns form their plural in some other way than by adding s. For example child has the plural from children, tooth has the plural teeth, and man has the plural men. The common list of such nouns in English is not long but it includes some that are extremely common. Such nouns are irregular in their plural formation.6 2.1 Inflection vs. derivation Within a lexeme based theory of morphology, the difference between derivation and inflection is that derivation gives you new lexemes, and inflection gives you the
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Mark Aronoff, Kristen Fudeman, What is morphology? Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, An Introduction to English Morphology: Words and Their Structure

forms of a lexeme that are determined by syntactic environment. But what exactly does this mean, and is there really a need for such a distinction? Examples of inflection and derivation take took (Inflectional) atom atomize (Derivational) scribe scribes (Inflectional) see saw (Inflectional) ice de-ice (Derivational)

2.2 Differences between inflection and derivation Inflectional morphology doesnt change the core lexical meaning or the lexical category of the word to which it applies. A noun with a plural suffix attached to it is still a noun. Derivational morphology may or may not affect the lexical category of a word it applies to, and it typically changes its meaning. Glory is a noun, and glorious is an adjective. While their meanings are related, they cannot be said to mean the same thing.7 Inflectional morphology tends to be more productive than derivational morphology. Inflectional morphology can apply to words of a given category with relative freedom. Virtually any noun in English can be made plural with the addition of [z] or one of its two phonologically conditioned allomorphs. The only exceptions are those that have irregular plurals, such as children or phenomena, and those that
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Mark Aronoff, Kristen Fudeman, What is morphology?

logically do not allow a plural form: mass nouns like rice and abstract nouns like intelligence generally fall into this category. On the other hand, not every adjective can take the derivational affix ly that forms adverbs. We can say quickly, but not friendlily. Other difference is that derivational affixes tend to occur closer to the root or stem than inflectional affixes. Example a. commercial-ize-s b. Arriv-al-s The example shows that the English third person singular present inflectional suffixs occurs outside of derivational suffixes like the deadjectival ize, and the plural ending s follows derivational affixes including the deverbal al. Conclusion The term inflection means changing its shape to meet the demands of its syntactic position. Any change in form that is conditioned by syntactic factors counts as inflection, whether it involves affixation or not. Also, in this seminar work I discussed about the difference between inflection and derivation, possible inflectional morphology types which include affixation. I also established that inflectional morphology doesnt change the core lexical meaning or the lexical category of the word to which it applies and tends to be more productive than derivational morphology. popular-ize-s

Used literature - Bybee, Joan L. and sten Dahl. 1989, The creation of tense and aspect systems in the languages of the world; - Laura A. Janda, Inflectional Morphology - Mark Aronoff, Kristen Fudeman, What is morphology? - Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, An Introduction to English Morphology: Words and Their Structure

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