6. Kinds of morphemes and morphological processes
6.3. Inflection and derivation
Another way we can classify affixes is whether they are inflectional or derivational. In this section, we will spend just a little bit of time on the difference between inflection and derivation to get the basic idea. We will go much deeper into their differences in Chapter 9.
Inflection
Inflectional morphemes encode the grammatical properties of a word. Some common examples of inflectional morphemes include plural markers on nouns, as shown in (1); tense and aspect markers on verbs, as shown in (2); or comparative and superlative markers on adjectives, as shown in (3).
| (1) | singular noun | plural noun | |
| a. | cat | cat-s | |
| b. | chair | chair-s | |
| c. | bush | bush-es |
| (2) | bare verb | past tense | past participle | present participle | |
| a. | walk | walk-ed | walk-ed | walk-ing | |
| b. | sew | sew-ed | sew-n | sew-ing | |
| c. | sleep | slep-t | slep-t | sleep-ing |
| (3) | bare adjective | comparative | superlative | |
| a. | red | redd-er | redd-est | |
| b. | long | long-er | long-est | |
| c. | happy | happi-er | happi-est |
Generally speaking, we don’t consider inflectional forms of the same stem to be different words, but to be different forms of the same word. The collection of all of the inflectional forms of a root are called the paradigm for that word. For example, the row (1a) is the paradigm for the noun cat, row (2a) is the paradigm for the verb walk, and row (3a) is the paradigm for the adjective red.
A word without any inflectional morphemes is often called the bare form. In examples (1)-(3), the bare form of each paradigm is in the first column. The bare form may be a root or it may be a complex form containing both a root and derivational morphemes.
We can also talk about an inflected word form as having morphosyntactic features. For example, cat would have the feature [+singular] and cats would have the feature [+plural]. Morphosyntactic features classify words into groups based on similar behaviour. For example, English words with the feature [+plural] share the behaviour of being marked with a plural marker and having the meaning of ‘more than one’.
Derivation
In contrast, derivational morphemes create words of new parts of speech or words with new meanings. For example, the verb scare can be changed into a new word, the adjective scary, by adding the derivational morpheme -y. Although scare and scary share the same root scare, they are different words. The verb scare refers to an event and belongs to a verbal paradigm and can take verbal inflectional morphology, such as scared and scaring, while the adjective scary refers to a quality and belongs to an adjectival paradigm and can take adjectival morphology, such as scarier and scariest.
Derivational morphemes don’t always change the part of speech of the word, though. Morphemes that change the meaning of the word enough that we want to call it a new word, even if it keeps the same part of speech, are still called derivational morphemes. For example, the prefix re-, attaches to verbs to form new verbs that mean to perform the action again, as in (4). Both scared and rescared are verbs.
| (4) | a. | My sister scared me. |
| b. | My sister scared me again. She rescared me. |
Sometimes derivational morphemes do both; they change the meaning substantially and change the part of speech. For example, adding the suffix -er to a verb creates a noun that identifies the person who performed the action, known as an agentive noun, or adding -able to a verb creates an adjective meaning that the action is possible to perform.
Derivational word forms based on the same root belong to the same word family, but each has their own, separate, inflectional paradigm. For example, the word family of scare includes the verb scare (5a), the adjective scary (5b), the noun scare (5c), and the adverb scarily (5d). It also includes more complex forms such as the repetitive verb rescare (5e), the agentive noun scarer (5f), and the adjective scareable which expresses possibility (5g). The word family even includes words containing multiple derivational morphemes, such as the word scariness in (5h), which consists of three morphemes: the verb root scare, the adjective-forming suffix -y (spelled with an <i> when it is not at the end of the word), and the noun-forming suffix -ness.
| (5) | a. | My sister scared me. | verb |
| b. | the scary costume | adjective | |
| c. | a big scare | noun | |
| d. | The ghost moved scarily. | adverb | |
| e. | After I calmed down, my sister rescared me. | repetitive verb | |
| f. | the scarers at the haunted house | agentive noun | |
| g. | My husband is easily scareable. | adjective of possibility | |
| h. | the scariness of this costume | noun derived from the adjective |
While it is often possible to list the complete paradigm for a word, it is not possible to list the complete word family of a root, since we can build infinitely complex words out of one root.
Key takeaways
- Inflectional morphemes encode the grammatical properties of a word.
- The list of the different inflectional forms of a word is called a paradigm.
- We can formally indicate the inflectional properties of a word using morphosyntactic features.
- Derivational morphemes create new words by changing the part of speech of a word, substantially changing its meaning, or both.
- The list of different words derived from the same root is called a word family.
Check yourself!
A morphological process that adds grammatical information, such as number, tense, gender, or case.
A morphological process that creates a new lexeme.
A number category, indicating non-singular.
Verbal inflection that indicates when the event took place, such as past, present, or future marking.
Verbal inflectional that indicates the internal time structure of an event, such as indicating that an action is complete, ongoing, repeated, etc.
An inflectional form of adjectives meaning "to a greater degree of X."
An inflectional form of adjectives meaning "to the highest degree of X."
The collection of all the word forms in a lexeme is called the paradigm for that lexeme, or the set of all the inflected forms of a word.
A word without any inflectional morphemes applied to it, or the simplest form in a paradigm.
The grammatical properties of a word, morpheme, or syntactic head which are relevant to its morphology or syntax.
synonyms: lexical category, syntactic category
We classify words into part of speech based on their syntactic function. Some examples of part of speech include noun, verb, adjective, and preposition.
A set of words related by derivation.
