Inflectional morphemes

English has only eight inflectional morphemes (or “inflections”), illustrated in the
following sentences.
• Jim’s two sisters are really different.
• One likes to have fun and is always laughing.
• The other liked to read as a child and has always taken things
seriously.
• One is the loudest person in the house and the other is quieter than a
mouse.

All inflectional morphemes are suffixes.

 Morphological description
Identify the morphemes in the sentence:
The child’s wildness shocked the teachers
Morphological description
Free and bound morphemes: Recap
 Problems in morphological description
 What is the inflectional morpheme that makes sheep the plural of
sheep, or men the plural of man?

 And if -al is the derivational suffix added to the stem institution to

give us institutional, then can we take -al off the word legal to get the
stem leg?

 What is the derivational relationship between law and legal, mouth

and oral?
 Problems in morphological description

 A reflection of the historical influence of different languages on

English word forms.

 An extremely large number of English words owe their morphological

patterning to languages like Latin and Greek.

 Consequently, a full description of English morphology will have to

take account of both historical influences and the effect of borrowed
elements.
 Morphs and allomorphs
 Morphs are the actual forms used to realize morphemes.
 When we find a group of different morphs, all versions of one morpheme,
we can use the prefix allo- (= one of a closely related set) and describe them
as allomorphs of that morpheme.

 For example, the form cats consists of two morphs, cat +-s, realizing a
lexical morpheme and an inflectional morpheme (“plural”). The form buses
also consists of two morphs (bus + -es), realizing a lexical morpheme and
an inflectional morpheme (“plural”). So (-s and -es, actually /s/ and /əz/) are
two different morphs used to realize the inflectional morpheme “plural.”
 Any other allomorphs of plural in English?
 Morphs and allomorphs
 In addition to /s/ and /əz /, another allomorph of “plural” in English seems
to be a zero-morph because the plural form of sheep is actually “sheep + ø.”
When we look at “man + plural,” we have a vowel change in the word (æ
→ ɛ) as the morph that produces the “irregular” plural form men.
 There are a number of other morphological processes at work in a language
like English, such as those involved in the range of allomorphs for the
morpheme “past tense.” These include the common pattern in “walk + past
tense” that produces walked and also the special pattern that takes “go +
past tense” and produces the “irregular” past form went.
 Different languages have different patterns.
Noun formation in Kanuri (a language spoken in Nigeria)
Exercise: What is the plural form in the following
language?
Exercise: What is the plural form of the following language?
Find verb stems, pronouns, and past and future morphs
• Future (ta); past (li); hit (piga); got (pata); you (u); I (ni); they
(wa); we (tu); “k” breaks a cluster of 2 vowels;
Exercise: Give a word structure rule for the following data
and a list of the morphemes
Key
Exercise: Discuss whether the morpheme ka is part of a
word or part of a phrase.
Exercises
a. Identify the morphemes in the sentence: The manager listened
impatiently as the clerk ’s claims became increasingly incredible.

b. Which of these words has a bound stem: construct, deceive,

introduce, repeat

c. What are the allomorphs of the morpheme “plural” in these words:

criteria, dogs, oxen, deer, stimuli, judges
 Exercises (follows)
a. What are the functional morphemes in the following sentence? When
he arrived in the morning, the old man had an umbrella and a large
plastic bag full of books.
Key: When, he, in, the, the, an, and, a, of
b. List the bound morphemes in these words: fearlessly, misleads,
previewer, shortened, unhappier
Key: -less, -ly, mis-, -s, pre-, -er, -en, -ed, un-, -er
c. What are the inflectional morphemes in these expressions? (a) Have
you eaten yet? (b) Do you know how long I've been waiting? (c) She's
younger than me and always dresses in the latest style.
Key: (a) -en, (b) -en, -ing (c) -er, -es, -est
Exercise
Key
Exercise
Key
 Word formation processes
 The constant evolution of new words and new uses of old words are
considered as a reassuring sign of vitality and creativeness in the way
a language is shaped by the needs of its users.
 The area concerned with the study of how new words enter a language
is etymology. It is the study of the origin and history of new words.
 Looking at etymologies of words makes us identify different processes
at work in English: coinage, borrowing, compounding, blending,
clipping, backformation, conversion, acronyms, derivation,
prefixes and suffixes, infixes, circumfix,…
 Coinage
It is the invention of totally new terms. The most typical sources
are invented trade names for commercial products. Older
examples are aspirin, nylon, vaseline and zipper; more recent
examples are granola, kleenex, teflon and xerox. The most salient
contemporary example of coinage is the word google, meaning
“to use the internet to find information.”
 Eponyms

New words based on the name of a person or a place are called

eponyms. common eponyms are sandwich (from the eighteenth-
century Earl of Sandwich who first insisted on having his bread
and meat together while gambling) and jeans (from the Italian
city of Genoa where the type of cloth was first made).
Borrowing
 Calque
 It is a class of loan in which a phrase is borrowed from another
language, but each of the elements of the phrase are translated.
 It involves respecting the syntactical structures of the target
language (week-end, “fin de semana”). There is also
“structure calque” in which the syntactic construction is new to
the target language (science fiction, “ciencia-ficción”).
 Calque avoids the direct use of the foreign words and contributes
to the richness of the target language.
 Unlike a loan, which is a phonetic and morphologic adaptation
(but not a translation like pizza), calque is a construction.
Compounding
Blending
Clipping
Backformation
Conversion
Acronyms
 Hypocorism
A hypocorism is an altered, usually shortened version of a word or
name that is usually used in informal or familiar situations.
Nicknames, pet names, and terms of endearment, such as those used
among friends, family members, or lovers, are often hypocorisms.

One common way of forming a hypocorism is by simply shortening

the original name. For example the given names Alexander,
Benjamin, and Jennifer are often reduced to their first syllable to
become Al, Ben, and Jen. Some names can be reduced to a single
later syllable, such as turning Ezekiel into Zeke.
 Affixation
 Some affixes have to be added to the beginning of the word
(prefixes) (e.g. un-, mis-). Other affixes have to be added to
the end of the word (suffixes) (e.g. -less, -ish).
 All English words formed by this derivational process have
either prefixes or suffixes, or both. Thus, “mislead” has a
prefix, “disrespectful” has both a prefix and a suffix, and
“foolishness” has two suffixes.
 A third type of affix is infixes, not normally used in English.
As the term suggests, it is an affix that is incorporated inside
another word.
 Derivation
It is the most common word formation process to be found in
the production of new English words. This process is called
derivation and it is accomplished by means of a large number
of small “bits” of the English language which are not usually
given separate listings in dictionaries. These small “bits” are
generally described as affixes. Some familiar examples are the
elements un-, mis-, pre-, -ful, -less, -ish, -ism and -ness which
appear in words like unhappy, misrepresent, prejudge, joyful,
careless, boyish, terrorism and sadness.
 Multiple processes
It is possible to trace the operation of more than one process at
work in the creation of a particular word. For example, the term
deli seems to have become a common American English
expression via a process of first borrowing delicatessen (from
German) and then clipping that borrowed form. If someone says
that problems with the project have snowballed, the final word
can be analyzed as an example of compounding in which snow
and ball were combined to form the noun snowball, which was
then turned into a verb through conversion. Forms that begin as
acronyms can also go through other processes, as in the use of
lase as a verb, the result of backformation from laser.
Exercise: Identify the processes in the words in red
1. That’s really fandamntastic!
2. Shiel still parties every Saturday night.
3. These new skateboards are nice.
4. When I’m ill, I want to see a doc, not a vet.
5. The house next door was burgled when I was babysitting the Smiths’
children.
6. I like this old sofa – it’s nice and comfy.
7. My guess is that the company will need a bailout.
8. I think Robyn said she’d like a toastie for brekkie.
9. You don’t need to button it.
Key
1. infixing (“damn” inside “fantastic”)
2. conversion (noun “party” → verb)
3. compounding (“skate” + “board”)
4. clipping (“doctor”) and clipping (“veterinarian”)
5. backformation (verb “burgle” from noun “burglar”) and backformation
(verb “babysit” from noun “babysitter”, which is a compound (“baby” +
“sitter”).
6. borrowing (from Arabic “suffa”) and hypocorism (from “comfortable”)
7. two examples of conversion of verbs (“to guess,” “to bail out”) to nouns.
8. two examples of hypocorism from “toasted sandwich” and “breakfast.”
9. conversion of the noun (“a button”) to a verb
Exercise: Can you identify the multiple processes involved in
creating the forms in red?
(a) Are you still using that old car-phone?
(b) Can you FedEx the books to me today?
(c) Police have reported an increase in carjackings in recent months.
(d) Welcome, everyone, to karaokenight at Cathy's Bar and Grill!
(e) Jeeves, could you tell the maid to be sure to hoover the bedroom
carpet?
(f) Would you prefer a decaf?
(g) I could drop off the radar for a time.
(h) She is doing some research on AIDS.
 Key
(a) clipping (phone from telephone) plus compounding (car + phone)
(b) blending (from Federal Express) plus conversion (noun to verb)
(c) blending (car + hijack) plus conversion (verb to noun)
(d) borrowing (from Japanese karaoke) plus compounding (karaoke + night)
(e) eponym (from William Hoover) plus conversion (noun verb)
(f) decaf is (usually) a reduced version of "a cup of coffee made with
decaffeinated coffee," so clipping is the most obvious process. The longer word
decaffeinated is a derivation via a prefix (de-) and two suffixes (-ate + -ed) from
caffeine, which was originally a borrowing from French. Conversion from noun
(caffeine) to adjective (decaffeinated) to noun (decaf) has also taken place.
(g) And (h) acronyms
Exercise: Complete the process and identify the type of
word formation in English
Exercise: Complete the process and identify the type of
word formation in English
 Answer the questions
a. Can a morpheme be represented by a single phoneme? Give examples. By
more than one phoneme? Give examples.
Yes, a morpheme can be represented by a single phoneme, like in: teacher (/ə/),
aside (/ə/), angry (/i/).
Yes, a morpheme can be represented by more than one phoneme, like in: freedom
(/dəm/), teacher (/titʃ/), talkative (/tɔk/)
b. Can a free morpheme be more than one syllable in length? Give examples. Can
a bound morpheme be more than one syllable? Give examples.
Yes, a free morpheme can be more than one syllable in length, like in: follow
(/fɑləʊ/), margin (/mɑ:dʒɪn/), characterize (/kæɹəktə/).
Yes, a bound morpheme can be more than one syllable in length, like in:
aggravation (/eɪʃən/), popularity (/ɪti/), privacy (/əsi/).
Answer the questions (follows)
c. Does the same letter or phoneme-or sequence of letters or phonemes-
always represent the same morpheme? Why or why not?
No, the letter (s) represents 3 different morphemes: plural (hats), 3rd person
singular (hides) and the possessive (cat’s meow). Moreover, the plural
morpheme is represented by 3 different sets of phonemes /s/, /z/ and /iz/.
Exercise: Divide the following into free and bound sets:
ation, nation, pre, post, angle, ible, infra, out
Key
Exercise: Separate the affixes from the stems in the following
words: Trains, succeeded, lighter, predetermined, retroactive,
confusions, instructional.
Example: faster = fast + er
Key

Train + s, succeed + ed, light + er, pre + de + termin + ed, re+tro+ act +
ive, con + fus + ion + s, in + struct + ion + al.
Exercise: which of the words below are open class
words and which are closed end words?
A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of
those intensely right words . . . the resulting effect is physical as well as
spiritual, and electrically prompt.
Thank you