In Chapter 1, this book has already mentioned that morphology is not only talking about the internal structure of words but trying to explain the processes within it. The basic processes we should know in linguistic morphology is inflectional and derivational morphology. These two processes are related to the use of affixes both prefixes and/or suffixes.
Inflectional morphology is the process of making a new word form by adding certain affixes (sometimes without adding affixes).
In Chapter 2 we have been familiar with word form in which it is a different form of words that is influenced by grammatical function.
The grammatical function can be related to tenses (for verbs), the plurality (for nouns), possessiveness (for nouns) and comparison degree (for adjective).
35 To make it easier to understand consider the examples below:
(1) John helps his mom working in a restaurant.
(2) John helped his mom working in a restaurant yesterday.
(3) John will help his mom working in a restaurant tomorrow (4) John is a helpful boy.
From the examples above we can see that examples (1), (2), (3) use different word forms of the lexeme HELP (see Chapter 2).
The difference between the word help in each example is that they are used in a different tense. (1) add –s to HELP since the sentence is written in the simple present tense, (2) add –ed to HELP because the sentence uses simple past tense and required past of verb, (3) does not add anything to the lexeme HELP since it is accompanied with modal will and indicate simple future tense. Those three words become three different word forms from the same lexeme
HELP. However, the suffixes attach to the lexeme HELP (e.g. –s, and –ed) do not give a new meaning to the word HELP , they only differ in terms of grammatical function.
Thus, when we look at (4) we may find that the word helpful is different from the word help. We can see it from the word classes they have. HELP in those first three sentences is a verb (in some cases, it can also be considered as a noun though, but in this sentence, it is a verb), while HELPFUL is an adjective. We can see that the difference between (4) and other sentences is that the suffix –ful attach to HELP in (4). The suffix –ful in this case, then change the word classes of HELP as a verb into HELPFUL as an adjective.
36 The process occurs in the first three sentences is called inflectional morphology and which occurs in (4) is called derivational morphology (we will learn about this process further in Chapter 6).
Nonetheless, the question that might come to our thought ‘is a derivational morphology will always change the word classes of the base word? To get the answer to pay attention to the example below.
(5) Larry likes to play guitar.
(6) Larry is a wonderful guitarist.
The examples above contain two almost-similar words
GUITAR and GUITARIST As we all know that GUITAR is a noun then we attach the suffix –ist to GUITAR to create a word
GUITARIST. However, GUITARIST itself is also a noun (a person who plays guitar as a profession). So, simply we do not find any change of word classes. But we should note that GUITAR and
GUITARIST are different in meaning in which GUITAR refers to a musical instrument that is inanimate while GUITARIST is the person who used GUITAR and it is animate. Also, there is no grammatical function brought by the adding of –ist in the word GUITARIST, they do not tie to certain adverbs of time or plurality. Therefore, should we consider this process as a derivational morphology? Sure, so we need to revise that derivational morphology is not the process in which adding affixes to change the word classes but to create new lexeme. GUITAR and GUITARIST are definitely different lexeme that is why we need to see the two of them in dictionary entries.
37 The distinction between inflection and derivation has previously been made: inflection generates word forms from known lexemes, whereas derivation develops new lexemes from other lexemes. Thus, creating word form working from the lexeme
WORK would almost universally be regarded as inflection, and creating a lexeme HAPPINESS from HAPPY would nearly universally be accepted as derivation.
As I mentioned earlier, in inflectional morphology it is commonly involved the addition of bound morphemes -we can call it affixes- to the root or base words. The set of bound morphemes attach to root or base in inflectional morphology are called inflectional morphemes. These are not used to produce new words in the language, but rather to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word. Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word is plural or singular, if it is past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form.
English has only eight inflectional morphemes (or
“inflections”), illustrated in the following sentences.
(7) Donald’s two brothers are really different.
(8) One likes to have fun and is always laughing.
(9) The other liked to read as a child and has always taken things seriously.
(10) One is the loudest person in the house and the other is quieter than a mouse.
In the first sentence, both inflections (-’s, -s) are attached to nouns, one marking possessive and the other marking plural. Note
38 that -’s here is a possessive inflection and different from the -’s used as an abbreviation for is or has (e.g. he’s reading, it’s happened again). There are four inflections attached to verbs: -s (3rd person singular), -ing (present participle), -ed (past tense) and -en (past participle). There are two inflections attached to adjectives: -er (comparative) and -est (superlative). In English, all the inflectional morphemes are suffixes (Yule, 2010).
In the recent literature, this has been accomplished by seeing inflection and derivation as canonical categories and offering a set of criteria that, in canonical circumstances, separate the two, or tests that may be used to establish which type of morphology is being utilized in individual cases.