Week3- morphology Dr. Monira I. Al-Mohizea

used to indicate a relation of possession or association.

Exercise!

• Following the inflectional suffixes tables, think of other examples in English for nouns:
• Native irregular plurals vs. borrowed irregular plurals

And for verbs:

• Regular vs. irregular

And for adjectives:

• Comparative vs. superlative

Inflection (2)

• Inflectional properties may be inherent (a morpheme is associated with its properties regardless of context).
• E.g. Countable vs. uncountable nouns

Hammer(s) *equipment(s)

Derivation

• Derivation is not motivated by the syntax, its role is to generate new lexical items.
• Derivation changing meaning

Input Derived word

Possible impossible

Tell retell

Do undo

• Derivation changing syntactic category

Faith (noun) faithful (adjective)

fierce (adjective) fiercely (adverb)

sing (verb) singer (noun)

Discuss!

• Differences:

Inflection vs. Derivation??

Inflection vs. Derivation

• Derivation tends to affects the meaning of the word, while inflection tends to affect only its syntactic function.
• Derivation tends to be more irregular and sporadic – there are more gaps, the meaning is more idiosyncratic and less compositional, but inflectional morphology is mostly regular.
• E.g. all verbs take –ing but we cannot say ( *yellowen) following (whiten and darken).
• Therefore, derivational processes tend to be more productive than inflectional ones.
• The boundary between derivation and inflection is often fuzzy and unclear. Discus with your partner & give examples

• Complex words (containing a sequence of suffixes) such as, Sing-er-s.
• The derivational suffixes are nearer to the root (-er) whereas the inflectional plural –s suffix is at the edge of the word.

Diagram

Thank You 