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Inflection is the change or marking of a word to reflect grammar, such as gender, tense, number or person. The main verb of an English sentence must be inflected for subject and tense. In the following English sentence, come is inflected for person and number by the suffix -s: The mailman comes about noon. inflection in grammar. In many languages, words or parts of words are arranged in formally similar sets consisting of a root, or base, and various affixes. Thus walking, walks, walker have in common the root walk and the affixes -ing, -s, and -er. An inflectional affix carries certain grammatical restrictions with it; for example, with the plural inflection -s, a change from singular to plural in the noun tree/trees requires a concommitant change in the verb form from singular to plural: "the tree is green," "the trees are green." Other examples of English inflectional suffixes are the verb tenses. 1. She spoke with no inflection. 2. She read the lines with an upward inflection. 3. Most English adjectives do not require inflection. 4. "Gone" and "went" are inflections of the verb "go." 5. English has fewer inflections than many other languages. "Word endings can also be inflections, which indicate categories such as tense, person and number. The inflection -ed can change a verb from present to past tense (walk/walked), and the inflection -s can indicate third person singular concord with a subject. But inflections do not change the word class. Walk and walked are both verbs." Two traditional grammatical terms refer to inflections of specific word classes: * Inflecting a noun, pronoun, adjective or determiner is known as declining it. The affixes may express number, case, and/or gender. * Inflecting a verb is called conjugating it. The affixes may express tense, mood, voice, and/or aspect. English In English many nouns are inflected for number with the inflectional plural affix -s (as in "dog" → "dog-s"), and most English verbs are inflected for tense with the inflectional past tense affix -ed (as in "call" → "call-ed"). English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the third person singular in the present tense (with -s), and the so-called present participle (with -ing). English short adjectives are inflected to mark comparative and superlative forms (with -er and -est respectively). In addition, English also shows inflection by Ablaut (mostly in verbs) and Umlaut (mostly in nouns), as well the odd long-short vowel alternation. For example: * write, wrote, written (Ablaut, and also suffixing in the participle) * sing, sang, sung (Ablaut) * foot, feet (Umlaut) * mouse, mice (Umlaut) * child, children (vowel alternation, and also suffixing in the plural) A limited subset of English verbs and nouns are related by stress-change inflection. Such is the case of pairs like a record (noun, stressed on the first syllable) vs. to record (verb, stressed on the last). Inflection is the change of a word's form according to the context. For instance, English verbs get the 's' ending in the third person singular; they get 'ed' in the past tense. Nouns get an 's' in plural. Although English is an inflected) language, it has lost most inflections. Nouns, pronouns, and verbs in modern English are inflected, but adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are not. Inflection is the change in the form of a word to mark distinctions of tense, person, number, gender, mood, voice, and case. In English, this usually is accomplished by adding endings. Examples are the "s" or "es" to denote the plural form of nouns (chairs, boxes), "er" or "est" for comparatives (taller, tallest), and "s," "ed," or "ing" for verbs (walks, walked, walking). Another type of inflection uses changes to the stem, or main word part of the word (sing, sang, sung). Five personal pronouns have different forms for subject and object (e.g., he - him, she - her). Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes (smallest units of meaning) to a word, which indicate grammatical information (for example, case, number, person, gender or voice, mood, tense, or aspect). Derivation is the process of adding derivational morphemes, which create a new word from existing words, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (for example, changing a noun to a verb). Four Verb Forms The inflections (endings) of English verb forms are not difficult to remember. There are only four basic forms. Instead of forming complex tense forms with endings, English uses auxiliary verb forms. English does not even have a proper ending for future forms; instead, we use auxiliaries such as "I am going to read this afternoon." or "I will read." or even "I am reading this book tomorrow." It would be useful, however, to learn these four basic forms of verb construction.
An affix is a word element that attaches to a word as a prefix (pre-, dis-) or a suffix (-able, -er). An affix may be Greek (hyper-) or Latin (-ment), or native (over-, -ness). Many different affixes are used in English. Some have the same meaning. Some have many meanings. Another important aspect of the English language is composition (compounding). This is the creation of a new word from two other words. The new word may be: 1. A compound word in which the first component noun modifies the second noun (e.g., barmaid, countertop, songbird, ballgame); 2. A compound word constructed from a noun plus a noun, which consists of a verb plus a suffix (e.g., homeowner, lawnmower). 3. A compound constructed from a verb plus an object (e.g., drivetime, callgirl, singsong, football, sunrise). 4. An adjective plus a noun (e.g., redcap, blackface, lowball. shortcake; 5. A noun and a present participle (e.g., backbreaking, woodcutting, housewarming). Back-formation is the reverse of affixation. It is the formation of a new word from one that is incorrectly assumed to have been derived from the former. For example, the verbs "edit" and "act" derive from "editor" and "actor," although one assumes the contrary. Some English words are blends. These are telescoped forms, such as motorcade (motor cavalcade) or coalescences, such as bash (bang and smash). English has only three categories of meaning which are expressed inflectionally, known as inflectional categories. They are number in nouns, tense/aspect in verbs, and comparison in adjectives. Within these categories, English has a remarkably small inventory of affixes, by comparison with languages such as Spanish or Russian. English does not always use affixes to express these categories (see the discussion of irregular morphology). Inflectional categories and affixes of English
Spanish, by contrast, inflects its nouns for number and gender, but not for possession (which is signalled by placing the particle 'de' between the possessed item and the possessor, as in 'la casa de mi madre', 'the house of my mother'. Spanish has far more inflectional categories — and affixes to mark them — for verbs than does English. Spanish inflectional categories and affixes
Here are some ways English inflectional morphology is irregular:
Suppletion (instead of a suffix,
the whole word changes):
Syntactic marking (added meanings
are indicated by a separate word rather than marking with a suffix or change
to the base):
Below is a sample of some English derivational affixes. This is only a sample; there are far more affixes than presented here. Some derivational affixes of English
1. Affixation:
adding a derivational affix to a word. Examples: abuser, refusal,
untie, inspection, pre-cook.
Noun
Verb
Noun
Adjective
Exercise: Word Formation Processes Working with a partner, supply five more
English words that exemplify each of the above word formation processes.
If you don't have a partner to work with, supply three words for each process.
A dictionary will be of some help. You will probably not be able to find
examples of backformation; this requires knowledge of the history of words
that would be very difficult to track down without a lot of extra work.
Skip this category.
Many morphemes of English have more than one way of being pronounced; this is often not reflected in the spelling of the morpheme. Such variations affect both affixes and roots. Sometimes the pronunciation varies because of nearby sounds; sometimes there is no logic to it — its motivation lies in forgotten history. The pronunciation variants of a morpheme
are called allomorphs. The phenomenon of variation in the pronunciation
of a morpheme is called allomorphic variation or morphophonemic
variation (since it is the phonemic makeup of a morpheme
that is varying). The variations themselves are sometimes called morphophonological
processes.
Motivation: Phonological. /d/ occurs after vowels and voiced consonants other than /d/; /t/ occurs after voiceless consonants other than /t/; and /@d/ occurs after the alveolar stops /t/ and /d/.
Unmotivated allomorphy: A change in the pronunciation of a morpheme that is not based on the phonological surroundings. Most of these simply must be memorized. Examples:
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