12 Derivational and Inflectional Morphology
Ms. Anshikha Adhikari
Introduction
Language is analysed at various levels. As maintained by many linguists, language is analysed at various levels. These are the levels of:
- Sounds (Phonetics and phonology)
- Words (morphology)
- Structure (Syntax)
- Context (Pragmatics)
- Meaning (Semantics)
Phonetics is the discipline which deals with the study of sounds. The set of possible human sounds are studied under this discipline and the set of sound system used in a particular natural language is studied under the discipline of phonology.
Morphology is the study of words and how given sounds combine together to form a word. The term morphology refers to the analysis of minimal forms in language which are constituted of sounds and are used to make words which have either a grammatical or a lexical function.
Syntax is the study of how words combine together to form a sentence. It is concerned with the meanings of words in combination with each other to form phrases or sentences.
Semantics is the study of meaning. Here one touches, however, on practically every other level of language as well as there exists lexical, grammatical, sentence and utterance meaning.
Pragmatics The concern here is with the use of language in specific situations. The discipline of pragmatics depends for its analyses on the notion of speech act which is concerned with the actual performance of language in a contextually defined scenarios..
Morphology
Morphology is the study of words. It studies the internal structure of the words and how they change their form to generate new words and the kinds of different roles they play in a sentence, strictly following the linguistic rules. Morphology is often referred to as grammar of word, the set of rules which govern the words in a natural language. During antiquity, grammars of languages were based on the models of classical Latin and Greek which themselves were rooted in Sanskrit, which consisted of a large number of endings.
Morphology is the layer of linguistics which is primarily concerned with the internal structure of words, whether these be simple or complex words, whether they contain grammatical information or have a purely lexical status. There are various aspects which have to be kept in mind while dealing with words and their forms.
The fundamental concept in morphology is that of lexeme. For example, boy and boys are both the same word, in the sense that they have the same lexeme boy. It is a unit in morphology which exists regardless of the fact that there can be multiple forms of that particular word.
For example, walk/ walked/ walking/ walks are all forms of a single lexeme called walk.
These lexemes constitute the lexicon of a speaker. Lexicon is the mental vocabulary of a person which only keeps a list of all the lexemes.
In morphology, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful grammatical unit of a language. A morpheme may or may not be an independent identity. This is so because, it may stand alone as an independent meaningful unit. On the other hand, it may or may not stand as an independent unit.
If a morpheme can represents an independent meaning, it is called a root.
For example, in the word like cats,
cat is a root which can exist independently. -s on the other hand is the plural marker. Such words are also called as free morphemes.
Some of the examples of free morphemes are:
cat, run, happy, fast, good, friend etcetera.
Bound morphemes appear as a part of a word. They have a meaning but they cannot exist independently on their own. They have to be a part of word to convey their meaning. For example,
-ness in happiness, -ly in highly, -s in boys, -ful in spoonful, -ed in walked, ir- in irreparable etcetera.
Bound morphemes are further classified into Inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes. Words and their forms are created on the basis of the rules provided by Inflectional and derivational morphology.
INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY
Let us look at some sentences first.
1. The violinist performed in the plaza yesterday.
2. The violinist performs in the plaza everyday.
3. The violinist will perform in the plaza next week.
4. The violinist is performing in the plaza right now.
5. The performance of the violinist was magnificent.
In sentence 1,2,3 and 4 the verb to perform is changing its form in accordance with the tense, aspect and mood.
In sentence 1, suffix -ed is added to the root perform to express past tense.
In sentence 2, suffix -s is added to the root perform because it is grammatically conditioned by the third person singular subject of the subject the violinist.
In sentence 3, modal+ verb is introduced to express an act in future.
In sentence 4, -ing form is attached to the root of the verb to express an action which is going on.
On the other hand, in sentence 5, the word performance is not a verb; it is a noun. In first four sentences, the grammatical category i.e. verb remains constant whereas in the last sentence the grammatical category changes from verb to noun.
Sentence 1 to 4 are an instance of inflection while sentence 5 is an instance of derivation. We will now discuss inflectional morphology in detail. We will come back to derivational morphology later.
Inflectional morphology creates new forms of the same word, whereby the new forms agree with the tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender and the mood of an utterance.
The inflection of verbs is called as conjugation whereas the inflection of nouns, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs and articles is called as declension. The inflected form of a word often contains both one or more free morphemes (a unit of meaning which can stand by itself as a word), and one or more bound morphemes (a unit of meaning which cannot exist independently as a word). Words which never undergo the process of inflection are said to be invariant; for example, the English verb must is an invariant item: it never takes a suffix or changes form to signify a different grammatical category. Its categories can be determined only from its context.
For example,
1. You must put down your thoughts in writing.
2. The must has been examined by the experts. In the first sentence, must has been used as a verb.
But in the second sentence, must has been used as a noun.
The set of related forms of a word is called as a paradigm. For example,
jump: jump/jumped/jumps/ jumping dance: dance/danced/dances/dancing gobble: gobble/ gobbled/ gobbles/gobbling An inflected form expresses its grammatical category/s through various prefixes and suffixes it gets attached to.
A prefix is a bound morpheme, which is added in the beginning of the word to create a new form.
For example, un- is added before happy and generates unhappy which is the antonym of the former.
Some more instances are:
in+ justice= injustice
in+ appropriate= inappropriate
un+ likely= unlikely
ir+ responsible= irresponsible
When a bound morpheme is attached to the end of the word, then such morphemes are called as suffixes.
For example
walk+ ed= walked
kitchen+ ette= kitchenette
damage+ ed= damaged
cow+ s= cows
A circumfix is another kind of an affix which attaches itself to the base and surrounds it.
For example
en+ light+ en= enlighten
em+ bold+ en= embolden
dis+ continue+ ous= discontinuous
An infix is an uncommon affix which is inserted within the root. It is a characteristic feature of hip hop slang.
For example,
absolutely+ blooming= abso-bloomin-lutely
Inflections can be broadly classified into :
- Regular inflection
- Irregular inflection
Regular inflection refers to those inflections which follow a standard pattern.
For example:
dance+ ed= danced
merge+ ed= merged
boy+ s= boys
competition+ s= competitions
The regular suffix for a verb is -ed. For example:
surge+ ed= surged
roam+ ed= roamed
But this -ed is phonologically conditioned. In other words, the ending sound of the root decides the pronunciation of the past form of a particular verb. It is pronounced as /t/, /d/ and/id/.
If the final sound of the root is an unvoiced sound then the suffix -ed is pronounced as /t/. For example,
hope+ ed= hoped (-ed pronounced as /t/)
talk+ ed= talked (-ed pronounced as /t/)
If the final sound of the root is voiced sound then the suffix -ed will be pronounced as /d/. For example,
judge+ ed= judged (-ed pronounced as /d/)
open+ ed= opened (-ed pronounced as /d/)
If the final sound of the root is /t/ or /d/ then the suffix -ed will be pronounced as /id/. For example,
hand+ ed= handed (-ed pronounced as /id/)
post+ ed= posted (-ed pronounced as /id/)
Similarly, the regular plural morpheme is suffixed to the end of the English nouns. For example,
rose+ s= roses
stop+ s= stops
Similar to the past suffix -ed, -s is also phonologically conditioned. In other words, the ending sound of the root decides the pronunciation of the plural form of a particular noun. It is pronounced as /s/, /z/ and /iz/.
If the last consonant of the word is voiceless, then the -s is pronounced as /s/.
cup+ s= cups (-s pronounced as /s/)
cliff+ s= cliffs (-s pronounced as /s/)
If the last letter of the words ends in a voiced sound, then the -s is pronounced like a /z/. boy+s= boys (-s pronounced as /z/)
gem+s= gems (-s pronounced as /z/)
If the last letter of the word is a sibilant, then the -s is pronounced like a /iz/.
rose+s= roses (-s pronounced as /iz/)
bush+s= bushes (-s pronounced as /iz/)
There are more many verbs and nouns which exhibit irregular inflection. Words with irregular inflections do not fall in the above mentioned categories.
For example,
mouse+ s= mice
child+ s= children
man+ s= men
Even the comparative and superlative degrees of certain adjectives exhibit this property. For example,
good, better, best bad,
worse, worst
Irregular inflection is also exhibited in many verbs. The form generated after adding the suffix -ed is entirely different from its base.
For example,
throw+ ed= threw
sing+ ed= sang
Suppletion is another process which occurs in inflectional morphology. The occurrence of phonemically unrelated allomorphs of a morpheme is called as suppletion.
For example,
go+ ed= went
good+ er= better
bad+ er= worse
DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY Derivational morphemes are affixes which are added to a lexeme to change its meaning or function. It basically involves two significant processes. One major difference which distinguishes Inflectional morphology from derivational morphology is that, the latter does not only change the form of a word, it also changes the category and the meaning of the word. One of them is affixation and the other one is compounding and the other affixation.Compounding occurs when two or more words are joined together to form a meaningful longer word. For example:scare+crow = scarecrow post+office= postoffice maid+ servant= maidservant bitter+sweet= bittersweetSemantically speaking compound words can be of four types. They are exocentric, endocentric, copulative and appositional.
Endocentric compounds: An endocentric compound consists of a head whereby the meaning gets restricted to the head of the compound.For example: steamboat, blackboard, hairbrush, tablecloth etcetera.
Exocentric compounds: In an exocentric compound, there is a formal head but the meaning is not restricted to the head of the compound. The meaning generated is totally independent of the word formed.For example, scarecrow, spoilsport, killjoy, pickpocket etcetera.
Copulative compounds: In a copulative compound words, both the words are considered as head. In other words, they both contribute to the overall meaning of the compound word.For example, deaf-mute, bittersweet, poet-doctor etcetera.
Appositional compounds: An appositional compound is formed when two contrary characteristics define the meaning of the resultant compound.For example, player-coach, maidservant.
Almost all the natural languages exhibit the case of compound formation. Since we have already dealt with the semantic classification of the compounds, let us now explore the syntactic classification of the compounds. Syntactically speaking, compounds can be divided into four broad categories, but many more minor categories exist.Broad categories of compounding are:
- Noun-noun compounding: When two or more nouns are combined together, the resulted compound word is also a noun. For example: keyboard, doghouse, sunflower, greenhouse etcetera.
- Verb-noun compounding: these kinds of compound words are formed by the combination of a verb and its object. For example, spoilsport, rainfall, breakfast, pickpocket etcetera.
- Verb-verb compounding: Verb-verb compounds are formed as a result of sequencing of two verbs. A compound verb may also include a prepositional verb, phrasal verb and an auxiliary with a verb. For example, oversee, backspace, wear away etcetera.
- Adjective-adjective compound: In the case of adjective-adjective compound, two attributes are joined together to form a single idea. For example, bittersweet, high- speed, part-time.
Affixation is another linguistic process in which prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes are added to a word to derive a new form out of it.
Affixation can be both inflectional and derivational. In the case of inflection, affixes do not change the grammatical category of the word. For example,
boy, boys
hop, hopping, hops, hopped
In the case of derivation, the grammatical category of a word changes. The meaning of the derived form has a strong connection with the root.
For example, happy, happiness
develop, development
Productivity
One of the most vital aspect of derivational affixes is their productivity. Some affixes are more productive than the others. In other words, they can be used more freely than other affixes. Productivity is a relative phenomenon. Some affixes are more productive while some are less.
Bauer (2001) makes a clear distinction between productivity and creativity. He posits that productivity is a rule governed linguistic process while creativity is not. Creativity, on the other hand is a language feature which has been often termed as ‘productivity’ by linguists like Hockett, chomsky and others. Creativity as recognised by them is language feature which enables human being to generate infinite number of words and utterances from a finite set of words and sentences.
For example,
When a prefix un- is added to adjectives and theirs derivatives and adverbs, then usually an antonym of that particular word is generated. In another context, it also shows the reversal of a particular action.
For example,
Meaning ‘not’
un+ fair= unfair
un+ accept= unaccept
un+ abridged= unabridged
Meaning ‘reversal of action’
un+ fasten= unfasten
un+ do= undo
un+ cork= uncork
As we saw in the above example, productivity is a rule governed process. We cannot add the prefix un- to any word and expect a new word to sprout.
Now let us look at some of the suffixes:
The latinate suffix -ist is added to a noun to form an adjective or a noun.
-er on the other hand, is added to a verb to generate agentive nouns. -er is one of the most productive suffix of all because, it can be attached to almost all the verbs and thus create an agentive noun.
teach+ er = teacher
Many linguists like Matthews and Anderson recognise the notion of semi-productivity. This category consists of those idiosyncratic affixes which do not get attached to apparent eligible words. Not only this, when such affixes are used, then the resultant meaning of the word gets narrowed significantly.
Constraints of productivity
The most common phenomenon which provides a constraint for productivity is called as blocking. Blocking happens due to some specific semantic, phonological or morphological reasons.
Let us look at some examples,
There is separate nominal form for the verb to steal which is thief. Therefore, one cannot generate a term *stealer to refer to someone who steals.
In the case of phonological constraints, suffix -en can be added to a word which ends with an obstruent sound like
black + en= blacken
Some other affixes are also sensitive to the morphological constraints. Words which take -ize suffix can be converted into a noun by adding another suffix -ation. For example,
generalize + ation= generalization
capitalise + ation= capitalisation
colonize+ ation= colonization
This rule again prohibits the above mentioned bases to get attached to other suffixes like -age,-ment, -al.
Similarly, certain words which take a prefix like un-, for example
un+ well= unwell
un + intentionally= unintentionally un + fair= unfair
They cannot take any other prefix with them. For example,
in+ well= *inwell
in+ intentionally= *inintentionally
in+ fair= *infair
Conclusion
Inflection and Derivation are two extremely vital processes which have provided infinite words to all the natural languages.
Let us now sum up the module by identifying the major differences between inflectional morphology and derivational morphology.
| you can view video on Derivational and Inflectional Morphology | |
Reference
- Aronoff, Mark. Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes. Cambridge: MIT, 1996. Print.
- Bauer, Laurie. Morphological Productivity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print. Bauer, Laurie. Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Print. Bauer, Laurie. Morphological Productivity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.
- Carr, Ian. Morphology. New York: Plenum, 1980. Print.
- Fromkin, Victoria A. Linguistics: An Introduction to Linguistic Theory. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2009. Print.
- Katamba, Francis, and John T. Stonham. Morphology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, n.d. Print.
- Stump, Gregory T., and Raphael A. Finkel. Morphological Typology: From Word to Paradigm. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. Print.