English Morphems - Morphology

A. Definition

Inflectional morphemes are bound morphemes that alter the grammatical state of the root or stem. They do not carry any meaning on their own, as is the nature of bound morphemes, but serve a critical function in inflected languages such as English. (It should be noted, however, that English is more of an analytic language, one that depends more heavily on sentence structure than conjugations and declensions.)

These bound morphemes express such concepts as tense, number, gender, case, aspect, and so on. In other words, they are grammatical markers. Unlike derivational morphemes they do not change the syntactic category of a word. A verb remains a verb no matter the inflectional morpheme, and a noun a noun. Additionally, they cannot be joined to incomplete morphemes. For example, you can add the derivational bound morpheme "atic" to "unsystem" to get "unsystematic." You cannot, however, add a possessive marker to make "unsystem's."

Inflectional morphemes typically follow derivational morphemes in the hierarchy of morpheme structure. IE, they occur last, at the end of the morpheme, not before any derivational morphemes. It is, for example, "unlikely hoods" for more than one unlikely hood, not something like "unlikelyshood."

The example we started out with. The word “girls” consists of two morphemes:

·         The free lexical morpheme girl that describes a young female human being

·         The bound inflectional morpheme -s that denotes plural number

The Contrast between derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes:

B. The Eight English Inflectional Morphemes

English used to be highly inflected and had a very rich variety of inflectional morphemes. Now, however, there are only eight left. They are:

Verbal	Nominal	Adjectival
3rd singular. Present –s	Plural –s	Comparative –er
Past Tense –ed	Possessive –‘s	Superlative –est
Progressive –ing
Past Participle -en

	MORPHEME	GRAMMATICAL FUNCTION	EXAMPLES
NOUNS	Plural	Marks as more than one	regular: dogs, cats, horses. irregular: sheep, cacti, phenomena, children.
	Possessive	Marks for ownership	Bart’s, Homer’s, Marge’s
ADJECTIVES	Comparative	Marks for comparison (usually accompanied by than)	closer, whiter, quicker
	Superlative	Marks as superlative (sometimes accompanied by of)	closest, whitest, quickest
	3rd-singular. Present Agreement	Marks to agree with singular third person (his, her, it), in the present tense	runs, waits, pushes
VERBS	Past Tense	Marks (roughly) for past action	regular: dragged, backed, baited. irregular: hit, ran, swam
	Past Participle	Marks past participle (follows be or have): “Bart was chosen” “I have chosen Bart)	“regular”: chosen, proven,woken. irregular: drunk, hung; waited (same as past tense)
	Present Participle	Marks present participle (follows be: “Bart was walking”)	walking, jumping, swinging

Reference:

http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/%7Eraha/306a_web/EnglishInflectionalAffixes.pdf