A word and its form:

Inflection
By :
1. Nur Habibatul Aliyah 190511100085
2. Fariz Fadillah Akbar 190511100086
3. Nur Laila Luthfia 190511100093
 1. Words and Grammar: Lexemes, Word Form and Grammatical Word

Lexemes : Word with unique meaning/ basic meaning

ex : talk
Word Form : Sequence of Sounds or letters formed from one lexemes.
ex : talk -> talk, talks, talked, talking
Grammatical Word : To specify the relationship between lexemes and
word
 Part of Speech
- Open Class Word : Possible to add new word (Verb, Noun, Adj,
Adverb)
- Close Class Words : Not possible to add new word (Prep, Det, Conj,
Aux, Pro, etc)

Morphemes :
- Free Morphemes
- Bound Morphemes
•Inflectional : Express Grammatical Categories (Plurality, gender, tenses
etc)
•Derivational : Change meaning of a word or Part of speech
•Root : Minimal free morphemes

ex : Happy in Unhappy

• Base : Word to which a morpheme is added in Inflection and

Derivation

ex : Unhappy in Unhappiness

• Stems : Base of an inflected forms only

ex : Reproduce in Reproduced
 Inflection

Morphological change by means of which a word adapted to a

grammatical function without changing its lexical meaning
 2. Regular and Irregular Inflection

• Regular Inflection : The way change a word's form to reflect things like tense, plurality,
gender, comparative and possessive

ex :

1. Add "ed" or "d" to create past tense -> walked, heard

2. Add "es" or "s" to create plurals in the end of nouns -> cats, watches, fishes

Irregular Inflection : Many instances in which the way a word is inflected doesn't seem to
follow any rules or conventions at all. In irregular inflection there's a suppletion :

- Partial : Change part of the word form.

- ex : ring -> rang, run ->ran

- - Full : Changes whole word form.

- ex : go -> went
  
3. Forms of nouns

From a morphological point of view, nouns are less varied than verbs, that having
just two forms (singular and plural).
• Cat Cats
> I saw a cat in the garden
> I saw some cats in the garden

There are also some noun that not change the vowel even though be a plural
form.
For example like: deer, sheep, fish, etc.

1. A deer was visible through the trees.

2. Two deer were visible through the trees
• Possessive nouns

A possessive noun is a noun that possesses something.

For examples :
• The boy’s pencil was missing
• The chickens’ eggs were taken by the farmer
 4. Forms of pronouns and determiners

• Pronouns
are used for persons or things and change form according to the people
or thing they refer to and their position in a sentence (Subject or Object).

Singular Subject Object Plural Subject Object

Pronouns Pronouns Pronouns Pronouns
1st person I Me
1st person We Us
2 person
nd
You You
3rd person He Him 2nd person You You
She Her
It It 3rd person They Them
• Determiners

Determiner is a word like an article, the, a, an, that comes at the beginning of a
noun phrase.

For examples :

1. The party 2. A snake

 5. Form of verbs

• In English, a verb lexeme has at most five distinct forms, as illustrated here with
GIVE :

1. Gives

2. Gave

3. Giving

4. Given

5. Give
• For the form ‘perfect or passive participle’, two examples are
given, because perfect and passive contexts can be distinguished
clearly
• For the verb V like the perfect participle of V and passive participle of
V are that the grammatically and expressed by the same word form
• When two grammatical words that are distinct for some lexemes are
systematically identical for others, as here, these forms are said to be
syncretised, or to exhibit syncretism
• The same syncretism also occurs with some irregular verbs, such as
dig and sting (past = perfect participle dug, stung) and all those that
use the suffix -t, such as bend, feel, and teach (bent, felt, taught)
 6. Form of Adjective
Many English adjectives exhibit three forms for the example

1. Grass is green

2. the grass is greener now than in winter

3. The grass is greenest 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.
Other adjectives with similar forms are:
Positive Comparative Superlative
happy happier happiest
long longer longest
pure purer purest
untidy untidier untidiest
good better best

the suffixes -er and -est appear on adjectives whose

basic form has one syllable, or two provided that the second syllable ends in a vowel (e.g. tidy,
yellow), while longer adjectives usually require the periphrasis.
THANK YOU
1. Regular or partial/full suppletion?

Man + Pl number + pl

Cat + pl drive + past

Go + past wait + past

Take + past

2. He makes the ................... Painting to his girlfriend. (simple)

3. Karina is the ................... Woman in this event. (pretty)

 The answer
1. Men - partial Cats – regular
Went – full Took – partial
Numbers – regular drove - partial
Waited – regular
2. Simplest
3. Prettiest