Week 5: Inflection II

English Morphology

Fernanda Barrientos

2024-11-19

Inflection in English: nouns

  • While there is some inflection in English, there is very little
  • In nouns, English inflects for number, that is, singular and plural
    • One cat, two cats
    • One child, two children
    • One mouse, two mice
    • One goose, two geese

Inflection in English: nouns and pronouns

  • We can also see that there is a bit of case:
1st 2nd 3rd
singular subject I you he/she/it
object me you him/her/it
possessive my your his/her/its
plural subject we you they
object us you them
possessive our your their
  • I/you/(he|she|it) gave me/you/(him|her|it) my/your/(his|her|its) book


  • We/you/they gave us/you/them our/your/their book
  • And in nouns, we find the ’s marking for possession: Mary’s book

Inflection in English: verbs

  • Number: only marked in 3rd person, and only in the present tense (with the exception of the verb to be)
number person pronoun present past
singular 1st I walk walked
2nd you walk walked
3rd he/she/it walks walked
plural 1st we walk walked
2nd you walk walked
3rd they walk walked

The progressive

  • Aspect and voice in English are rendered periphrastically
  • Progressive forms express an ongoing action
  • It is formed with the auxiliary to be + present participle (-ing)
Tense Example
Present progressive I am mowing the lawn
Past progressive I was mowing the lawn
Future progressive I will be mowing the lawn

The perfect

  • The perfect expresses something that happened in the past but still has relevance to the present
  • We form it with the auxiliary to have + the past participle (- ed for regular verbs, just like the past, but irregular verbs have different forms)
    • We can also form past and present perfect
Tense Example
Present perfect She has eaten at that restaurant
Past perfect She had eaten at that restaurant

The passive

  • The passive voice is formed with the auxiliary to be + the past participle
  • We can also build present and past versions of the passive
  • And even past perfect passive… and past continuous…
Tense Example
Present Fruit cake is eaten by the guests regularly
Present continuous The fruit cake is being eaten by the guests at the moment
Present perfect The fruit cake has been eaten by the guests already
Past Fruit cake was eaten by the guests last Monday
Past continuous Fruit cake was being eaten by the guests as they waited for the coffee
Past perfect The cake had been eaten by the guests hours before I got there
Future The cake will be eaten by the guests tomorrow

Irregular verbs

  • English has both regular and irregular inflections
  • All regular inflections are suffixal, but irregular forms are often formed by internal stem change (ablaut) or by a combination of internal stem change and suffixation. Sometimes even nothing at all!
Present Past Past participle Formed with
sing sang sung vowel stem change
tell told told vowel stem change + suffixation
cut cut cut nothing
sit sat sat vowel stem change
write wrote written vowel stem change + suffixation

Why does English have so little inflection?

  • English used to have a lot of inflection!
  • You might remember from SHE II that Old English had a case system
    • Four cases (same as in German)
    • Case and number agreement in adjectives and articles

Why does English have so litle inflection?

  • Furthermore, English verbs inflected for number, person, tense, and mood
  • And verbs could be either strong or weak

Some reasons

  • Possible reason 1: stress
    • Old English had a fixed stress pattern, where the first syllable was always stressed
    • This led to the loss of the following syllable, which is where the inflection was
    • But then, why did German not change in the same way?
  • Possible reason 2: language contact
    • Old Norse was also spoken in the north of Britain by the Danes
    • OE and ON were mutually intelligible, but the inflectional endings would differ, thus causing confusion
    • Therefore, speakers in contact would de-emphasize or simply drop the ending

Paradigms

  • A paradigm is the total of the different inflectional forms of a particular lexeme or class of lexemes.
    • Paradigms for nouns or adjectives are called declension
      • When a language have different declension patterns for a noun, it usually means that there are different word classes in which nouns can be grouped
      • Thus, every group of words that decline following the same pattern is a word class
    • On the other hand, paradigms for verbs are called conjugation

Paradigms: Declension in Latin

  • Latin had five different patterns of declension (i.e. word classes)
  • They were defined by the stem form (final sound, vowel length, etc.)

Paradigms: Conjugation in Latin

  • Latin had four different conjugations, depending on the theme vowel

Relationships between forms in a paradigm

  • If you recall the conjugation of Old English (both weak and strong verbs), you might have noticed that all the plural forms are exactly the same
    • This is called syncretism: forms that repeat themselves across a paradigm
  • You may have also noticed that the verb to go in present day English has a complete different form for the past tense: went.
    • This is called suppletion: one or more of the inflected forms of a lexeme are built on a base that is completely different from other members of the paradigm

Productivity

  • In morphology the term “productive” is used a lot (and we will discuss it at large later). For the time being, we will say that a certain word formation process is productive when it can be applied to other lexemes or bases
    • While derivation processes are not always productive, inflection is 99,9% productive
      • Every English verb will take -ing to form a progressive
  • What is the 0,01% then?
    • Some verb forms may feel a bit “odd”. Do they even exist? (e.g. forego -> forwent???)

Inherent and contextual

  • Contextual inflection is determined by the syntactic construction where the word is
  • On the other hand, inherent inflection does not depend on the syntactic context
    • Number and gender is inherent in nouns and pronouns
    • However, the case of a noun will always depend on the syntactic context

Derivation vs. inflection

  • The following are crucial differences between derivation and inflection:
Derivation Inflection
Does it change the category?
Does it add lexical meaning?
Does it add grammatical meaning?
Is it fully productive?
Does it produce new lexemes?
Is it important to syntax?

Derivation vs. inflection

  • The following are crucial differences between derivation and inflection:
Derivation Inflection
Does it change the category? yes no
Does it add lexical meaning? yes no
Does it add grammatical meaning? no yes
Is it fully productive? no yes
Does it produce new lexemes? yes no
Is it important to syntax? no yes
  • But one more thing: inflection always goes after derivation! (e.g. booklets and not * bookslet)

Summary

  • English has relatively little inflection, but:
    • It inflects for number in nouns
    • It shows case inflection in pronouns
    • Verbs are marked in 3rd person in the present tense, and have the same past form for person
      • Further tense and and aspect distinctions are conveyed periphrastically
  • English used to be inflectionally rich, but this changed due to perhaps phonological and historical reasons
  • Paradigms show the inflection patterns in a language, where some forms relate to each other in terms of syncretism and suppletion

Next week

  • Read Lieber, rest of Ch. 6
  • Attend the tutorial