Inflection vs. Derivation

Once you understand the difference between words and lexemes, you can understand the distinction made by morphologists between inflection and derivation.

Inflection involves the formation of grammatical forms – past, present, future; singular, plural; masculine, feminine, neuter; and so on – of a single lexeme. The use of these grammatical forms is generally dictated by sentence structure. Thus is, are, and being are examples of inflected forms of the lexeme BE, which happens to be highly irregular not only in English, but in many other languages as well. Regular verb lexemes in English have a lexical stem, which is the bare form with no affixes (e.g., select) and three more inflected forms, one each with the suffixes -s, -ed, and -ing (selects, selected, and selecting). Noun lexemes in English have a singular and plural form. Adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and other parts of speech typically have only one form in English.

As you can tell from the example of select given above, one way inflection can be realized is through affixes. Further examples of affixal realization of inflection can be found in the following box.

Examples of words + inflectional morphemes

Nouns: wombat + s

              ox + en

Verbs: brainwash + es

             dig + s

             escape + d

             rain + ing

Derivation involves the creation of one lexeme from another, such as selector or selection from select. Compounding is a special type of derivation, since it involves the creation of one lexeme from two or more other lexemes. In the discussion of non-separability above, we had many instances of compounds (doghouse, greenhouse, hot dog, and deer tick), all of which are formed by combining two lexemes. Many processes can be involved with derivation. In the box on the next page we give only examples of affixal derivation.

One question you may be asking yourself is how we distinguish inflection from derivation. This issue is addressed fully in Inflection, but we give two criteria here: (1) derivation generally results in a change in lexical meaning or the lexical category of a particular word, while inflection does not; and (2) the application or non-application of inflectional morphology generally depends on the syntactic context (e.g., what is the subject of the verb? is the noun singular or plural?), while the application of derivational morphology does not.

Examples of words + derivational affixes

Nouns to nouns:                      New York + ese

                                                  fish + ery

                                                  Boston + ian

                                                  auto + biography

                                                  vice + president

Verbs to verbs:                        un + tie

                                                 re + surface

                                                pre + register

                                                under + estimate

Adjectives to adjectives:      gray + ish

                                               a + moral

                                               sub + human

                                               il + legible

Nouns to adjectives:           hawk + ish

                                             poison + ous

                                             soul + ful

                                             iron + like

Verbs to nouns:                  discombobulat + ion

                                             acquitt + al

                                             digg + er

Adjectives to adverbs:        sad + ly

                                             efficient + ly

Readers will come across the terms word formation and lexeme formation, both referring to derivation, in the morphological literature. We avoid the term word formation, since it is used by some linguists to refer to both inflection and derivation or to morphology in general.

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المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

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المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Affixation in the item-and-process and item-and-arrangement models

Lexemes

An outline of grammatical evolution Conclusions

Evidence from signed languages

Treating events like objects

Nouns and verbs The fifth layer

Nouns and verbs

Layers

The parameters

Grammaticalization

Questions and approaches

The Genesis of Grammar