A MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF INFLECTIONAL AFFIX IN SHORT STORY

OF THE GOLDEN TOUCH

Abstract
This research aims at identifying the types of inflectional affixes in the Short Story entitled
The Golden Touch by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The technique of gathering data includes
reading the story, identifying and analyzing the content of the story. In this research,
description and analysis of the given language structure such as root words, affixes, part of
speech or context are found in the short story. The analysis reveals that there are words
attached with inflectional affix found in the story. Based on the analysis of data the findings
show there are are 6 types of English inflectional affixes exists in the short story namely (1) -
s plural (2) -'s possessive (3) -est superlative (4) -ed past tense (5) -ing progressive and (6) -
en past participle. Therefore, the short story of The Golden Touch reveals morphological
structures which do not change the form class of the words to which they are attached. The
study suggested improving students and teachers mastery of the vocabulary. The readers
should be aware of how to apply inflectional affixes by breaking the word into its root,
acquire meaning of the inflected words, and build the word by themselves. Morphological
awareness emerges as a significant contributor to word recognition and comprehension skills.

Keywords: morphology, morphemes, and inflectional affixes

1. Introduction

The term ‘morphology’ takes its origin from ‘morph’ (means form, shape) and ‘-
ology (means study of something). German linguist August Schleicher named
morphology as a sub-discipline of linguistics in 1859 for the first time (Kolanchery,
2015). In linguistics, morphology is defined as the study of the internal structures of
words and word formation processes (Carlisle, Goodwin, & Naggy, 2013)
(Oz, 2014) defines morphology as the study of the internal structure of words
and the rules governing the formation of words in a language. It is once again part of
our grammatical knowledge of a language, and like linguistic knowledge it is
generally unconscious knowledge.
Kieffer & Lesaux (2008) defines morphological analysis as broadly refers to
the understanding of word structure as involving combinations of meaningful units
known as morphemes Lapham (2020) also stated that morphological analysis refers to
the analysis of a word based on the meaningful parts contained within. Some words
cannot be broken down into multiple meaningful parts, but many words are composed
of more than one meaningful unit called morpheme.
Morphemes are the minimal units of meaning or grammatical functions that
are used to create new words (Oz, 2014). A morpheme that can stand alone as a word
is called free morpheme. A morpheme that must be attached to another morpheme is
called a bound morpheme. Some languages make use of infixes, which is a morpheme
placed with another morpheme to change the meaning of a word.
The term affix can be used to refer to prefixes, suffixes, and infixes as a group.
This leads to the formation of complex and compound words (Kolanchery & George,
 2014) within the realm of morphological analysis, two classes of morphemes are
defined. The two classes are inflectional and derivational.
Inflectional morpheme indicates certain grammatical properties associated
with nouns and verbs, such as gender, number, case and tense. The inflectional
morphemes are all suffixes. Kolanchery & George (2014) also added that, inflectional
suffix comes at the end of the word and no other suffix can be added to the world
further. It does not change the part-of-speech of the word like derivational affixes.
Derivational morpheme is one that added to root to form a new word that
differs in its part-of-speech classification. Derivational morphemes carry semantic
meaning and are like the affix version of content words. Schmid (2015) stated that
derivational morphemes play a huge role in word-formation.

2. Theoretical Background
This research focuses on inflectional affixes in the Short Story of The Golden Touch
by Nathaniel Hawthorne published in Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book for Girls and
Boys (1851). Inflections analyzed in The Golden Touch are in terms of morphological
inflectional affix. The morphological inflectional affix indicates grammatical
meaning, such as tense or number.
This study assumption is supported by Realizational Morphology or "word-and-
paradigm" (WP) was a theory first created by linguist, Charles F. Hockett.WP
morphology focuses on the whole of a word rather than morphemes or internal
structure. This theory also denies that morphemes are signs (form-content pairs).
Instead, inflections are stem modifications which serve as exponents of morphological
feature sets.The theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to
combine morphemes into word-forms, or to generate word-forms from stems, word-
based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional
paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations
are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The examples are usually drawn
from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based
theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of
grammatical categories, for example, "third person plural".
Morpheme-based theories analyze such cases by associating a single morpheme with
two categories. Item-and-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in
cases like these, because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules
here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them
turns out to be artificial. Application of a pattern different from the one that has been
used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where
older follows the normal pattern of adjectival comparatives) and cows replacing kine
(where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation).

3. Methodology

The researcher applied the structural analysis. This method aims at investigating the
given language structure such as root words, affixes, part of speech or context are
found in the short story.

4. The Object of the Study

 The object of the study is the inflectional affixes found in the short story of The
Golden Touch by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In other words, this research concerning the
morphological analysis of the words attached with inflectional affixes in the content
of the story.

5. Source of Data
The Short Story of The Golden Touch by Nathaniel Hawthorne published in
Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1851). Inflections analyzed in The
Golden Touch are in terms of morphological inflectional affix. The morphological
inflectional affix indicates grammatical meaning, such as tense or number.

6. Procedure of Collecting Data

The procedures are as the following stages:

(1) Reading the short story

(2) Identifying the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs attached with inflectional
affixes found in the short story.
(3) Classifying the types of inflectional affixes found in the short story of The Golden
Touch

(4) Analyzing the functions of those inflectional affixes in the short story of The
Golden Touch

7. Analyzing Data

Table 1. Inflectional Morphemes of English

  INFLECTIONALMORPHE  PARTS OF S
WORD  ROOT
ME/AFFIXES PEECH
days day -s plural noun
counting count -ing progressive verb
dreamed dream -ed past tense verb
richest rich -est superlative adjective
received receive -d past tense verb
directed direct -ed past tense verb
wanted want -ed past tense verb
granting grant -ing progressive verb
king’s king -’s possesive noun
cheated cheat -ed past tense verb
wishes wish -es plural verb
visions vision -s plural noun
insisted insist -ed past tense verb
granted grant -ed past tense verb
reached reach -ed tense verb
picked pick -ed tense verb
thrilled thrill -ed tense verb
richer rich -er comparative adjective
father’s father -‘s possesive noun
widen wide - en past participle verb

8. Findings

Table 1 shows the 6 types of inflectional affixes in the story. There are twenty words
attached found in the short story. Noun such as DAY, KING, VISION and FATHER
are attached with the suffix –S and –’S make the noun into its plural and third-person
singular form. Verb such as COUNTING (root word is COUNT-) and –ING as its
suffix; GRANTING (root word is GRANT-) and –ING is its suffix, making the
progressive form of the verb. Verb such as DREAMED (root word is DREAM-),
RECEIVED (root word is RECEIVE), DIRECTED (root word is DIRECT),
WANTED (root word is WANT), CHEATED (root word is CHEAT), INSISTED
(root word is INSIST), GRANTED (root word is GRANT), REACHED (root word is
REACH), PICKED (root word is PICK), and THRILLED (root word is THRILL)
has –ED as suffix attached to its root making the past form of the verb. The word
WIDEN (root word is WIDE) has -EN attached to its root making it in the past
participle form of a verb. Adjective words such as RICHER and RICHEST (root word
is RICH) has -ER and -EST suffixes attached to its root making it in a comparative
and superlative degree form of an adjective. The suffixes -S and -’S can inflect a noun
to its plural and third person singular form. The suffixes -ER and -EST can inflect an
adjective for comparative and superlative degree. The suffixes –S and –ED can inflect
a verb for present tense and past tense, respectively. A verb+-ING can inflect a verb
for present progressive. Moreover, the suffix -EN make the verb into its past
participle form.
9. Discussion
In the table presented in the Data Analysis it shows a summary of the 20 occurrences
words attached with inflectional affixes in the short story the Golden Touch. Based on
the analysis of data the findings show there are are 6 types of English inflectional
affixes exists in the short story namely (1) -s plural (2) -'s possessive (3) -est
superlative (4) -ed past tense (5) -ing progressive and (6) -en past participle.
Therefore, the short story of The Golden Touch reveals morphological structures
which do not change the form class of the words to which they are attached.

10. Conclusion

Based on the data discussed and analyzed, the following generalization is arrived at:

1. The short story of The Golden Touch by Nathaniel Hawthorne reveals the different
types of inflectional affixes in the content of the short story

Acknowledgement
The researchers would like to express their gratitude to Doctor Francis Mervin L.
Agdana, English 217 Morphology and Syntax professor, Surigao State College of
Technology for extending her valuable expertise and knowledge in the making of this
research.

References

What is Morphology by Mark Aronoff and Kirsten Fudeman

https://books.google.com.ph/books?
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rm&sig=xqJzd4JsXk0H1km3AHWb4OwRNgc&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=morpho
logy&f=false

Morphology by Peter H. Matthews

https://books.google.com.ph/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=JGEAHLg1rmcC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=morphology+&ots=7KNUn
VmnvN&sig=30jgzgaACL_RJCbheNP6-
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An Approach to Morphology
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1161&context=nels

Joaquin, A. (1991). The Role of Morphology in the Process of Language Acquisition

and Learning

Stump, Gregory T. (Gregory Thomas) (2001). Inflectional morphology : a theory of

paradigm structure
PERSONAL BACKGROUND
Name: Ma. Clarisse G. Domagtoy
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EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
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Surigao State College of Technology – Surigao City Campus
Surigao City

Graduate Studies: Master of Arts in Education, major in English

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Surigao State College of Technology- Surigao City Campus
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Surigao State College of Technology-Surigao City Campus
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EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
Present: Master of Arts in Education, major in English
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Surigao State College of Technology – Surigao City Campus
Surigao City
Graduate Studies: Master of Arts in Education, major in English
(ongoing)
Surigao State College of Technology – Surigao City Campus
Surigao City

Tertiary: Bachelor in Secondary Education, major in English

Surigao State College of Technology-Surigao City Campus
Surigao City
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Secondary: Sta. Fe National High School

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