Inflectional Morphemes 5y6334

Inflectional Morphemes

Wang, 1

Inflectional Morphemes in the English Language

According to Delahunty and Garvey (2010), “Morphemes are the smallest forms in a language that have meanings or grammatical functions.” Morphemes can be either free or bound. Free morphemes are lexemes that can occur on their own without being attached to any other morpheme. For example, words like dog, chair can have meanings independently; they are also called the root. Bound morphemes are word parts that always need to be attached to other root words to create meanings. Bound morphemes are usually affixes, mostly prefixes and suffixes but can sometimes be infixes. Those of which are not presented in the form of affixes are called cranberry morphemes. Cranberry morphemes are “a type of bound morphemes that cannot be assigned a meaning nor a grammatical function, but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from the other.” (Aronoff, 1976) For example, the bound morpheme -ceive originally from Latin meaning “to seize something” can be found in words like receive, conceive, etc. A word can have one or more bound morphemes. For example, the word walks contains one free morpheme walk and one bound morpheme -s; The word surprisingly contains three morphemes, one free morpheme surprise, which can occur on its own; and two bound morphemes -ing and -ly that need to be attached to the root morpheme surprise to function as a signal of the inflection of a noun surprise from adjective surprising to adverb surprisingly. Furthermore, bound morphemes can be divided into two categories, inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes. Derivational morphemes are word parts that changes the meaning or part of speech when they are attached to a root. For example, if a bound morpheme -ment is attached to the root govern, it changes the part of speech from a verb govern to a noun government. Inflectional morphemes are word parts that do not change the meaning or the part of speech when they are attached to a root. For example, the plural mark -s does not change the meaning or class when it is attached to the root dog and changing it into dogs, it only signals the plural form of the root. Thus, the inflectional morphemes are implemented to signal syntactical relationships in sentence constructions, the derivational morphemes are utilized to

Inflectional Morphemes

Wang, 2

create new words related to the root words’ meanings. However, the notions of these two categories are very often confused especially by ESL learners. Therefore, in this morphology research paper, I will elaborate the definition, classifications, and functions, of the morphological, phonological and semantic conditioning of the inflectional morphemes in the English language in order to distinguish the utilization especially in the aspect of the different entries in dictionary compilations as well as to raise awareness for the fact of certain compounded development of inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes.

Types of Inflectional Morphemes in the English Language In the modern English language, only eight inflectional morphemes are used and all of them are suffixes (Quirk, et al., 1985): 1) Third person, singular, present tense of verbs: {-(e)s} {-(e)s} is a third person singular present tense indicative of verbs. For example, John walks to school every day. Note that if this third person singular present tense indicative {-s} is after a sibilant, which is a manner of articulation of fricative or affricate consonants that are higher in pitch such as /s, z, ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ/, the indicative will present in an allomorph form as {-es}. Allomorphs are different realizations of a morpheme depending on the phonological content without changing its meaning(s). For example, The dog catches the ball. 2) Plural marker of nouns: {-(e)s} In this case, {-s} is a grammatical structure that indicates the noun that it has attached to is more than one count, that is to say, in its plural form. For example, the plural form of the noun desk is desks. As mentioned above, if this plural marker is after a sibilant, it will present in an allomorph form as {-es}. For example, the plural form of the noun batch is batches. 3) Genitive of noun phrases: {-’s} Genitive is also known as the possessive case. It indicates the ownership or possession pertaining of a noun phrase. For example, John’s car is red. Note that if a

Inflectional Morphemes

Wang, 3

noun ends in the letter s, the genitive marker will present without {-’s} but only as an apostrophe {-’} due to the phonological environment. 4) Regular past tense of verbs: {-ed} This inflectional morpheme conjugates regular verbs to indicate the past time frame. For example, John walked to school today. 5) Past participle marker of verbs: {-ed, -en} Usually, this inflectional morpheme is utilized with have or ive be in the present perfect, past perfect and future perfect tenses. For example, The seat was taken./She has finished all the homework. 6) Comparative of short adjectives and adverbs: {-er} A comparative is a form that expresses the greater or lesser degree. A short adjective or adverb, in this case, is typically considered as adjective or adverb that consists two or less syllables. That is to say, the comparative form of most of the short adjectives or adverbs will be root+-er. For example, big/bigger, narrow/narrower. Note that if a one-syllable adjective or adverb ends in the letter e, the comparative form only need to add the {-s}. For example, nice/nicer. Moreover, if it ends in the letter y, the comparative allomorph will present as {-ier}. For example, greasy/greasier. 7) Superlative of short adjectives and adverbs: {-est} Superlative indicates the highest level. As mentioned above, if an adjective or adverb consist two or less syllables, in most cases, the superlative form will be root+-est. For example, bright/brightest, clever/cleverest. Note that if a one-syllable adjective or adverb ends in the letter e, the superlative form only need to add the {-st}. For example, nice/nicest. Moreover, if it ends in the letter y, the superlative allomorph will present as {-iest}. For example, happy/happiest. 8) Progressive marker of verbs: {-ing} This inflectional morpheme indicates the present continuous time frame of a verb. For example, study/studying. Note that if a verb ends in the letter e, the progressive form requires the verb to drop the e in order to attach the inflectional morpheme due to phonological content. For example, leave/leaving.

Morphological, Phonological and Semantic Conditioning of Inflectional Morphemes 1) Morphological conditioning of inflectional morphemes

Inflectional Morphemes

Wang, 4

Morphological conditioning refers to the allomorphs which occur without the influence of the nearby phonological content. It can be further classified into two situations: grammatical conditioning and lexical conditioning. Grammatical conditioning mainly occurs when the past tense of a verb is an irregular form such as sleep/slept, make/made, etc. Whilst lexical conditioning mainly occurs under the influence of phonemic environment or morphological environment. For example, /z, s, iz/ are the allophones of the plural marker {-s} due to phonemic influence. Lexical conditioning {ai, -i, -n, -e, -∅} only exist in certain words such as fish/fish, sheep/sheep. 2) Phonological conditioning of inflectional morphemes The inflectional morpheme {-ed} of the past tense of regular verbs has multiple allophones such as /t, d, id/. This depends on the coda of the root verb. For instance, if a verb ends in a voiceless consonant other than /t/, the {-ed} will be pronounced as /t/, such as walk ends in a voiceless consonant /k/, hence the coda of walked will be pronounced as /kt/. In contrast, if a verb ends in a voiced consonant other than /d/, the {-ed} will be pronounced as /d/, such as hug ends in a voiceless consonant /g/, hence the coda of hugged will be pronounced as /gd/. Lastly, if a verb ends in consonants like /t, d/, the {ed} will be pronounced as /id/, such as haunt ends in a voiceless consonant /t/, hence the coda of hugged will be pronounced as /id/, bend ends in a voiced consonant /d/, the coda of bended will be pronounced as /id/. 3) Semantic conditioning of inflectional morphemes The semantic conditioning mainly occurs in the morphemes that has both the inflectional meaning and derivational meaning. For example, {-ed} is the inflectional morpheme of regular past tense verbs, but it can also function as a signal of adjectives or adverbs such as completed; {-ing} is the inflectional morpheme of present progressive verbs, but it can also function as a signal of nouns like feeling. To sum up, inflectional morphemes can, on one hand, not only be influenced by morphological conditioning but also by the phonological and semantic content. On the other hand, even if the same inflectional morpheme can express different meanings or has different functions. Being able to understand the mutual interactions within different linguistic aspects would greatly facilitate the memorization of the inflectional morphemes.

Inflectional Morphemes

Wang, 5

Inflectional Morphemes vs. Derivational Morphemes According to Matthews (1991), inflectional morphology is defined “as the branch of morphology that deals with paradigms. It is therefore concerned with two things: on the one hand, with the semantic oppositions among categories; on the other, with the formal means, including inflections, that distinguish them.” Although Lin (1997) did not directly point out the difference between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes, he consider that the grammatical morphemes such as the plural marker {-s} and regular past tense verb {-ed} are utilized according to the syntactic environment whilst lexical morphemes are utilized to create new vocabulary. Jackson and Amvela (2000) also point out that “inflection is a general grammatical process which combines words and affixes to produce alternative grammatical forms of words” while “derivation is a lexical process which actually forms a new word out of an existing one by the addition of a derivational affix.”, that is to say, “the application of inflection leads to the formation of alternative grammatical forms of the same word, that of derivation creates new vocabulary items.” (Jackson and Amvela, 2000) Therefore, the difference between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes is certainly worth emphasizing. Take {-er} for example: if we regard the {-er} as an inflectional morpheme, never will it changes the meaning or part of speech of the adjectives or adverbs that is attached with it. Such as, both nice and nicer, big and bigger, are adjectives and neither their meaning nor parts of speech change accordingly by the addition of {-er}. However, if we regard the {-er} as a derivational morpheme, it will change the part of speech when it is attached to a verb such as hang/hanger, the verb hang becomes the noun hanger. Although the form in these two cases are exactly the same–bound morphemes–they function very differently. Wang (2001) points out that numerous English dictionaries and Chinese-English dictionaries did not strictly distinguish the differences between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes. For instance, in the Collins Cobuild: Essential English Dictionary (1991), care, careful and careless are listed under different entries, while happy, happiness and happily are listed under the same entry of happy. In Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978), modern, modernism, modernistic, modernity and modernize are listed as different entries as well as kind, kindly and kindness, happy, happiness, and happily are under different entries. However, it categorized keenly and keenness under the same entry of keen,

Inflectional Morphemes

Wang, 6

while it categorized carefully and carefulness under the careful entry but it also categorized carelessly and carelessness under the entry of careless. Moreover, in the English-Chinese Dictionary (1995) categorized modernly and modernness under the modern entry, while listing modernity, modernize and modernization as different entries separately. It also categorized happy, happiness and happily as different entries, whilst putting keenly and keenness under the keen entry. These chaotic categorizations significantly indicate the arbitrariness and inconsistency of dictionary compilations. In my opinion, due to the fact that a derivational morpheme changes the meaning and part of speech of a root word that it is attached to, the root word and the new vocabulary created by the addition of derivational morpheme should be categorized under different entries. Accordingly, because an inflectional morpheme does not change the meaning or the part of speech of a root word when the morpheme is attached to the root, the root word and the new vocabulary created by the addition of an inflectional morpheme to a root word should be categorized under the same entry. It is very important to note that the development of both inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes are not just single-streamed, separated traces, instead, they sometimes develop in a mixed way. In other words, inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes are interchangeable and closely related. This depends on the addition of inflectional morphemes to derivational morphemes. For example, if the noun computer is attached to a derivational morpheme {-ize}, it becomes the derivational morpheme computerize; but if we attach an inflectional morpheme {-ing}, the derivational morpheme will become the inflectional morpheme computerizing. Or, if the verb mark is attached to an inflectional morpheme {-ed}, it becomes an inflectional morpheme marked; we can also add a derivational morpheme {-ness} to change marked into a derivational morpheme markedness. From here we can see that the development of both inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes are mixed and complicated, it changes pertinently according to the content. Conclusion Although the inflectional morphemes in the modern English language only exist in eight forms, they can be influenced and be developed in many different ways. These confusing notions may level up the difficulty of the language acquisition process of ESL leaners. Hence, it is necessary for ESL teachers to thoroughly understand the definition, classification and utilizations

Inflectional Morphemes

Wang, 7

of inflectional morphemes as well as to know the morphological, phonological and semantic conditioning circumstances so they may explain and distinguish the complicated, mixed development of both inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes. Also, understanding the characters of inflectional morphemes can help ESL teachers to choose well-organized English dictionaries that are categorizing the word entries reasonably in order to better improve students’ academic performance. Moreover, though differentiating the usage of inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes are highly demanded, it is also necessary to related these two morpheme categories because they sometimes share a mixed, interacting development that seem to be the interchangeable process of either the inflectional morphemes or derivational morphemes of a root word.

References: Aronoff, M. (1976). Word Formation in Generative Grammar. MIT Press. Delahunty, G. P, and Garvey, J. J. (May 21, 2010). The English language: From Sound to Sense. Perspectives on Writing. The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. pp. 76-77 Jackson, H., and Amvela E. Z. (2000) Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology. A&C Black. Lin, C. (1997). An Introduction to English Lecicology. Wuhan University Press. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. (1978). Longman Group limited. Lu, G. (1995). The English Chinese Dictionary. Shanghai Translation Publishing House. Matthews, P. H. (1991). Morphology. Cambridge University Press. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., and Svartivk, J. (May 1, 1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Harlow: Longman. Sinclair, J. (1991). Collins COBUILD Essential English Dictionary. William Collins Sons & Co Ltd.. Wang, W. (2001). English Lexical Semantics. Zhejiang Education Publishing House.