Linguistics & Semantics

Lesson 3: Morphology

Morphological Processes

Inflection process is the process by which affixes combine with roots with the aim of indicating basic grammatical categories, for instance, tense, plurality (dog-s, call-ed: ‘s’ indicates plurality while ‘ed’ indicates the tense of the verb and are inflectional suffixes). This process, however, is seen as the process which adds very general meaning to existing words and it is not considered as the ‘creator’ (metaphorically speaking) of new words (inflectional affixes---grammatical markers----marking words for grammatical features).

Inflection (case, number, gender, marker) doesn’t change the part of speech class for the word. English has only eight inflectional endings. Nouns (there are only two inflectional endings ‘plural and possessive’); Adjectives (there are two inflectional endings ‘comparative ‘er and superlative est’); Verb (there are four inflectional endings ‘past tense, past participle, third person singular, progressive form’). Inflectional morphemes generally do not change basic syntactic category. Thus, we have ‘clear, clearer, clearest’.

Adjectives express grammatically required features or they indicate relation between different words in sentences. Examples: Ugo owes/ed me 10.000 euros: the ‘s’ marks the third person singular subject Ugo and the ‘ed form’ marks the past tense of the regular verb ‘to owe money’. They occur outside any derivational morphemes and then in ‘hyper-market-s’ the final ‘s’ is seen as inflectional and appears in the very end of the word, surely, outside the derivational morphemes ‘hyper-market-s’ (other examples: character/iz/ation-s, ration-al-iz-ation-s ).

Talking about Derivation Process we mean a process by which affixes combine with roots to create new words. The inflection/derivation difference is increasingly varied as shades of grey rather than absolute boundary. It is less regular and less predictable. Why do we have to add ‘al’ to the verb ‘to refuse’ to obtain ‘refusal’ and ‘ment’ to the verb 'to judge' obtain ‘judgment’? Derivational morphemes generally change the part of speech or the basic meaning of the word (-ment added to ‘judgement’). They are not required by syntactical relations outside the word (un-kind 'un' and 'kind' form a new word but there is any syntactical connection outside the word). We can choose Paul is ‘unkind’ or John is ‘kind’. They both are ‘kind or unkind’ therefore the choice depends on the context of situation.

They aren’t often seen as productive or regular in form and meaning because they can be selective in choosing their combination. If you look at the suffix ‘hood’ you can see that there are only few nouns (brother, neighbour, etc) which can be combined with this suffix (brotherhood, neighbourhood). They occur inside any inflectional affix.(in ‘government’ –ment is a derivational suffix that precedes ‘s’ which is an inflectional suffix).

Derivational words can have their suffixes or prefixes: ‘unspeakable’ (un-speak-able), ‘subconsciously’ (sub-conscious-ly), ‘unluckily’ (un-luck-y-ly), ‘unuseful’ (un-use-ful). Derivational morphology: derivational morphemes may change the part of speech class. (derivational affixes ‘prefixes and suffixes’). Derivational affixes are large in number: they are highly productive and recursive.

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