LINA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: United Nations Convention Against Torture, Back-Formation, Word Formation
Lecture 7
Morphology Part II
More about Inflection
Another type of word structure creation process
never change the category of words or morphemes to which they are attached
represent s for the most part the so-called grammatical markers, encoding information about tense,
number, gender, etc.
Some examples:
(a). I sail the ocean blue (default)
(b). He sails the ocean blue.
(c). John sailed the ocean blue.
(d). John is sailing the ocean blue.
English is not a highly inflected language. At the actual stage of English there are a total of eight bound
inflectional affixes:
-s third person singular present She wait-s at home.
-ed past tense She wait-ed at home.
-ing progressive She is eat-ing the doughnut.
-en past participle Mary has eat-en the cakes.
-s plural She ate the doughnut-s.
-'s possessive Disa's hair is short
-er comparative Disa has short-er hair than Karin.
-est superlative Disa has the short-est hair.
inflectional morphemes in English typically follow derivational morphemes (commit+ment+s, and not
*commitsment), with some exceptions in the case of compounds.
inflectional morphemes do NOT change the category or the type of meaning of the word they attach
to.
heart (N) →hearts (N)
Derivational morphemes might change the category; they also change the type of meaning of their
bases
heart (N) → heart-less(A)
How is inflection marked cross- linguistically?
Suffixation (as in the case of English)
Internal change
Suppletion
Reduplication
Internal change
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
A process that substitutes a non- morphemic segment for another to mark a grammatical contrast
I. ablaut a vowel alternation that marks grammatical contrast
Umlaut
a phonologically conditioned alternation from a previous stage of language history
One typical example in English: the plural geese from the singular goose (see next slide)
This type of change is known under the term umlaut
goose and geese
Old singular form of goose: /gos/
oOld plural form: /gos-i/
oUmlaut: /gœs –i/
oLoss of the plural suffix: /gœs/
oOther changes: /ges/ and then /gis/ ‘geese’
Suppletion
replaces a morpheme with an entirely different morpheme to indicate a grammatical contrast
some examples are in the table below:
Full Reduplication
Partial Reduplication
some languages allow partial reduplication, that copies only part of the base
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Another type of word structure creation process never change the category of words or morphemes to which they are attached represent s for the most part the so-called grammatical markers, encoding information about tense, number, gender, etc. At the actual stage of english there are a total of eight bound inflectional affixes: Disa has the short-est hair. inflectional morphemes in english typically follow derivational morphemes (commit+ment+s, and not. *commitsment), with some exceptions in the case of compounds. inflectional morphemes do not change the category or the type of meaning of the word they attach to. heart (n) hearts (n) Derivational morphemes might change the category; they also change the type of meaning of their bases heart (n) heart-less(a) A process that substitutes a non- morphemic segment for another to mark a grammatical contrast: ablaut a vowel alternation that marks grammatical contrast. Umlaut a phonologically conditioned alternation from a previous stage of language history.
