Morphology: A review

1. True or false?

a. Inflectional morphemes can be prefixes and suffixes. ( F )

b. Derivational morphemes can be either prefixes or suffixes. ( T )
c. Inflectional morphemes never change the word class or meaning of a word. ( T )
d. Derivational morphemes never change the meaning or word class of a word. ( F )
In fact, they often do!

2. Identify and classify all the morphemes in the following words. State the word
formation process which differs from all the others.

a. cats
b. unhappy
c. milder
d. bicycle
e. signpost
f. reassess
g. greedy
h. hateful
3. Complete the table with the missing information. (inflectional suffixes)

SUFFIX DESCRIPTION EXAMPLE

-s/-es 3rd person He/She likes sitcoms a lot.
sing.
present tense
-‘s Possessive

-s/-es Plural

-ing Progressive They’re leaving today.

(aspect)
-ed Past simple I talked for about an hour.

-ed/-en Past participle

-er Comparative

-est Superlative It’s probably the cheapest way.

4. Match the words on the left with the appropriate word formation process.

1. caveman a. affixation
2. unhelpful b. conversion
3. Xerox c. extension of meaning
4. edit d. clipping
5. RAM e. back formation
6. Fahrenheit f. proper noun
7. hand (v. “I handed it to you.”) g. acronym
8. bottle (v. “We bottled it here.”) h. compounding
9. toilet i. blend
10. smog j. borrowing
11. lab
12. brunch

1h 2a 3c 4e 5g 6f 7b 8b 9j 10 i 11 d 12 i
5. Identify the morphological processes involved in the creation of these words
from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.