{"id":149,"date":"2019-06-10T05:47:46","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T05:47:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engp13.epgpbooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/?post_type=chapter&p=149"},"modified":"2019-06-12T06:52:27","modified_gmt":"2019-06-12T06:52:27","slug":"derivational-and-inflectional-morphology","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/engp13\/chapter\/derivational-and-inflectional-morphology\/","title":{"rendered":"Derivational and Inflectional Morphology"},"content":{"raw":"
\"epgp<\/a>\r\n<\/span><\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n

Language is analysed at various levels. As maintained by many linguists, language is analysed at various levels. These are the levels of:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

    \r\n \t
  1. Sounds (Phonetics and phonology)<\/li>\r\n \t
  2. Words (morphology)<\/li>\r\n \t
  3. Structure (Syntax)<\/li>\r\n \t
  4. Context (Pragmatics)<\/li>\r\n \t
  5. Meaning (Semantics)<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

    Phonetics<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\r\n

    Morphology<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\r\n

    Syntax<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\r\n

    Semantics<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\r\n

    Pragmatics<\/strong> The concern here is with the use of language in specific situations. The\u00a0 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..<\/p>\r\n

    Morphology<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    For example, walk\/ walked\/ walking\/ walks are all forms of a single lexeme called walk.<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    If a morpheme can represents an independent meaning, it is called a root.<\/p>\r\n

    For example, in the word like cats,<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    Some of the examples of free morphemes are:<\/p>\r\n

    cat, run, happy, fast, good, friend etcetera.<\/p>\r\n

    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,<\/p>\r\n

    -ness in happiness, -ly in highly, -s in boys, -ful in spoonful, -ed in walked, ir- in irreparable etcetera.<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

    Let us look at some sentences first.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    1. The violinist performed in the plaza yesterday.<\/p>\r\n

    2. The violinist performs in the plaza everyday.<\/p>\r\n

    3. The violinist will perform in the plaza next week.<\/p>\r\n

    4. The violinist is performing in the plaza right now.<\/p>\r\n

    5. The performance of the violinist was magnificent.<\/p>\r\n

    In sentence 1,2,3 and 4 the verb to perform is changing its form in accordance with the tense, aspect and mood.<\/p>\r\n

    In sentence 1, suffix -ed is added to the root perform to express past tense.<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    In sentence 3, modal+ verb is introduced to express an act in future.<\/p>\r\n

    In sentence 4, -ing form is attached to the root of the verb to express an action which is going on.<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    For example,<\/p>\r\n

    1. You must put down your thoughts in writing.<\/p>\r\n

    2. The must has been examined by the experts. In the first sentence, must has been used as a verb.<\/p>\r\n

    But in the second sentence, must has been used as a noun.<\/p>\r\n

    The set of related forms of a word is called as a paradigm. For example,<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    A prefix is a bound morpheme, which is added in the beginning of the word to create a new form.<\/p>\r\n

    For example, un- is added before happy and generates unhappy which is the antonym of the former.<\/p>\r\n

    Some more instances are:<\/p>\r\n

    in+ justice= injustice<\/p>\r\n

    in+ appropriate= inappropriate<\/p>\r\n

    un+ likely= unlikely<\/p>\r\n

    ir+ responsible= irresponsible<\/p>\r\n

    When a bound morpheme is attached to the end of the word, then such morphemes are called as suffixes.<\/p>\r\n

    For example<\/p>\r\n

    walk+ ed= walked<\/p>\r\n

    kitchen+ ette= kitchenette<\/p>\r\n

    damage+ ed= damaged<\/p>\r\n

    cow+ s= cows<\/p>\r\n

    A circumfix is another kind of an affix which attaches itself to the base and surrounds it.<\/p>\r\n

    For example<\/p>\r\n

    en+ light+ en= enlighten<\/p>\r\n

    em+ bold+ en= embolden<\/p>\r\n

    dis+ continue+ ous= discontinuous<\/p>\r\n

    An infix is an uncommon affix which is inserted within the root. It is a characteristic feature of hip hop slang.<\/p>\r\n

    For example,<\/p>\r\n

    absolutely+ blooming= abso-bloomin-lutely<\/p>\r\n

    Inflections can be broadly classified into :<\/p>\r\n\r\n