Table 2.1 English Inflectional Morphemes

Generally, inflectional morphology in English is entirely productive, i.e. there are not arbitrary restrictions on how the affixes are combined with stems.

Even when there are irregularities in how the inflections are formed, each slot is normally filled. (A row is added here to distinguish the past tense in I walked from the participle in I have walked, since many irregular verbs distinguish these categories.).

General properties of inflectional morphemes:

- They do not change basic syntactic category: big, bigg-er, bigg-est are all adjectives.

- They express grammatically-required features or indicate relations between different words in the sentence: In Pat love-s Chris, -s marks the 3rd person singular present form of the verb, and also relates it to the 3rd singular subject Pat.

- They occur "outside" any derivational morphemes (closer to the edge of the word). In ration-al-iz-ation-s the final -s is inflectional, and appears at the very end of the word, outside the derivational morphemes -al, -iz, -ation.

- In English, they are all suffixes. Here are the regular forms (there are also numerous irregulars): -s Plural; -ed Past; -s 3rd sing Present; -ing Progressive; -er Comparative; -est Superlative.

Derivational morphology, on the other hand, creates new words from old ones: the core meaning might change significantly, and the resulting word will still require additional inflectional morphology appropriate to the context in which it is used. For example, walk and walker have fundamentally distinct (though, of course, related) meanings: one is an action, the other is a person (or a device to aid a person).

Basic properties:

- change the part of speech (noun, verb, etc.) or the basic meaning of a word: -ment added to a verb forms a noun (judg-ment)

- are not required by syntactic relations outside the word: un-kind combines un- and kind into a single new word, but has no particular syntactic connections outside the word

- are often not productive or regular in form or meaning -- derivational morphemes can be selective about what they'll combine with, and may also have erratic effects on meaning: the suffix -hood occurs with just a few nouns such as brother, neighbour, and knight, but not with most others.

some derivational affixes, though, are quite regular in form and meaning, e.g. -ism.

- typically occur "inside" any inflectional affixes (i.e. closer to the root): in governments, -ment, a derivational suffix, precedes -s, an inflectional suffix.

- in English, they may appear either as prefixes (pre-arrange), suffixes (arrange-ment) or no change at all (conversion) (as in saw (verb) and saw (noun)). It can also involve a change in the position of stress (per'mit (verb) - 'permit (noun)).

A list of English derivational morphemes appears as Appendix A.

Keep in mind that most morphemes are neither derivational nor inflectional! For instance, the English morphemes Joe, twist, tele-, and ouch.

One and the same morphemic segment of functional (i.e. non-notional) status, depending on various morphemic environments, can in principle be used now as an affix (mostly, a prefix), now as a root. Cf.:

out —a root-word (preposition, adverb, verbal postposition, adjective, noun, verb);

throughout — a composite word, in which -out serves as one of the roots (the categorial status of the meaning of both morphemes is the same);

outing — a two-morpheme word, in which out is a root, and -ing is a suffix;

outlook, outline, outrage, out-talk, etc. — words, in which out- serves as a prefix;

look-out, knock-out, shut-out, time-out, etc. — words (nouns), in which -out serves as a suffix.

Abstract complete morphemic model of the common English word:

prefix + root + lexical suffix + grammatical suffix

The syntagmatic connections of the morphemes within the model form two types of hierarchical structure. The first is characterised by the original prefixal stem (e.g. prefabricated), the second is characterised by the original suffixal stem (e.g. inheritors). If we use the symbols St for stem, R for root, Pr for prefix, L for lexical suffix, Gr for grammatical suffix, and, besides, employ three graphical symbols of hierarchical grouping — braces, brackets, and parentheses, then the two morphemic word-structures can be presented as follows:

W₁ = {[Pr + (R + L)] +Gr};

W₂ = {[(Pr + R) +L] + Gr}

Consider the example unusable. It contains three morphemes: prefix un- ; verb stem use; suffix –able.

What is the morphemic structure?

Is it first use + able to make usable, then combined with un- to make unusable?

Or is it first un + use to make unuse, then combined with -able to make unusable?

Since unuse doesn't exist in English, while usable does, the first structure is correct.

A

/ \

/ A

/ / \

un use able

This analysis is supported by the general behaviour of these affixes. As we saw, there is a prefix un- that attaches to adjectives to make adjectives with a negative meaning (unhurt, untrue, etc.). And there is a suffix -able that attaches to verbs and forms adjectives (believable, fixable, readable). This gives us the analysis pictured above. There is no way to combine a prefix un- directly with the verb use, so the other logically possible structure won't work.

Now let's consider the word unlockable. This also consists of three morphemes: prefix un-; verb stem lock; suffix -able

This time, though, a little thought shows us that there are two different meanings for this word. One is "not lockable," as with a box that simply has no latch on it: Don't store your money in that box, it's unlockable.

A

/ \

/ A

/ / \

un lock able

The second meaning is "able to be unlocked," in contrast with something that can't be unlocked because it's rusted shut or the key is missing: Now that we have the right key, the box is finally unlockable.

A

/ \

V \

/ \ \

un lock able

These two structures permit us to account for the two senses of unlockable.

We can combine the suffix -able with the verb lock to form an adjective lockable, and then combine the prefix un- with lockable to make a new adjective unlockable, meaning "not able to be locked".

Or we can combine the prefix un- with the verb lock to form a new verb unlock, and the combine the suffix -able with unlock to form an adjective unlockable, meaning "able to be unlocked".

By making explicit the different possible hierarchies for a single word, we can better understand why its meaning might be ambiguous. Because use is not a verb that effects a change, it cannot form the derived word *unuse. So unusable must be based on usable, and therefore is not ambiguous.

Morphemes can also be divided on a roughly semantic basis into categories of content and function morphemes, a distinction that is conceptually distinct from the free/bound distinction but partially overlaps with it in practice.

The idea behind this distinction is as follows: some morphemes express some general sort of referential or informational content, a meaning that is essentially independent of the grammatical system of a particular language, other morphemes are heavily tied to a grammatical function, expressing syntactic relationships between units in a sentence, or obligatorily marked categories such as number or tense.

Thus (the stems of) nouns, verbs and adjectives are typically content morphemes: throw, green, Chris, sand are all English content morphemes. ontent morphemes are also often called open-class morphemes, because they belong to categories that are open to the addition of arbitrary new items. People are always making up or borrowing new morphemes in these categories: smurf, nuke, byte, grok, chalupa, baathist.

By contrast, the following are typically function morphemes: prepositions: to, by, from, with; articles: the, a; pronouns: she, his, my; conjunctions: and, but, although; affixes: re-, -ness, -ly. Such morphemes either serve to tie elements together grammatically or to express morphological features such as definiteness that may be required in a particular language. Function morphemes are also called "closed-class" morphemes, because they belong to categories that are essentially closed to invention or borrowing -- it is very difficult to add a new preposition, article or pronoun.

For example, for years, some people have tried to introduce non-gendered pronouns into English, for instance sie (meaning either "he" or "she", but not "it"), but have had essentially zero success. This is much harder to do than to get people to adopt a new noun or verb, due to the basic distinction between open and closed class morphemes: the pronouns are part of a limited system, whereas normal nouns are a long list to which items can easily be added.