4.

4 Forms of Pronouns and Determiners

In morphology we are mainly concerned with the behaviour of words which belong to
open classes, namely nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs.

In English, the same technique is used for one small closed class of lexemes, namely
personal pronouns. For example if one replaces John and Mary with the appropriate pronouns
in these two examples, the outcome will be :

a) He loves her
b) She loves him

One possibility is to say that these are pronoun forms belonging to a third case, the
genitive or possessive, which stand in for apostrophe-s forms in noun phrases that consist
only of a personal pronoun. Another is to classify these words as determiners, because they
perform a determiner-like role and cannot be combined with other determiners.

4.5 Forms of Verbs

In English, a verb lexeme has at most five distinct forms. It is a peculiarity of

English verb morphology that the corresponding forms are always the same. In fact, most
verbs have only four forms, because the past tense and the perfect (or passive) participle
forms are the same.

The same syncretism also occurs with some irregular verbs, such as Dig and Sting in
the pas perfect participle become dug, stung and all those that use the suffix –t, such as bend,
feel, and teach (bent, felt, taught).

Instead of the usual verbal maximum of five forms, modal distinguish only two (e.g
can, could) or even just one (e.g must), while be distinguishes eight (am, is, are, was, were,
being, been, be).

4.6 Forms of Adjectives

Many English adjectives exhibit three forms, for example green here :

(30) Grass is green

(31) The grass is greener now than in winter

(32) The grass is geenest in early summer

The grammatical words that green, greener, and greenest express are the positive,
comparative, and superlative of green, contrasting on the dimension of comparison.

On the basis of our experience with plurals of countable nouns and past tense form of
verbs, then, you will probably expect that every adjective lexeme should possess a
comparative and a superlative form (or, at any rate, every adjective denoting a property that
can be present to a greater or lesser degree).