Inflectional vs. derivational morphology

Lesson 3

Derivational ad inflectional morphology

Warming Up

Linguistic terms.

What is the origin of terms? Terms are very often a result of a semantic shift (metaphor). Which means that the word belongs both to General English and a set of terms. The following are the definitions of words from general meaning you are to identify the word and give terminological definition

________ – the usually underground part of a seed plant body that usually functions as an organ of absorption, aeration, and food

________ – the main ascending axis of a plant; a stalk or trunk. b. A slender stalk supporting or connecting another plant part, such as a leaf or flower.

________ – one of various distinct forms of an organism or species.

________ – fasten, to secure, to attach

________ – descent or origination

Pre-reading task.

Discuss in pairs what is the difference between inflection and derivation (in Russian “formoobrazovanije” and “slovoobrazovanije”).

Task 1. Read the text and check your ideas.

Inflectional vs. derivational morphology

Inflectional morphology is one of the two main branches of morphology, the other being derivational morphology. In a nutshell, inflectional morphology distinguishes different inflections of the same lexeme, whereas derivational morphology distinguishes different lexemes that are related to one another; but they both use much the same range of morphological resources to do it. For example, the -ing of painting is inflectional in (1) and derivational in (2).

(1) He was painting a picture.

(2) We bought a painting.

In (1), painting is just one of the four distinct forms of the lexeme PAINTv (the verb PAINT), contrasting with paints, painted and paint. In (2) it is a distinct lexeme, the noun PAINTING, whose two inflected forms are painting and paintings.

Here are the main differences between inflectional and derivational morphology:

Inflectional morphology relates forms of the same lexeme; derivational morphology relates distinct lexemes.

Inflections are distinct word classes with distinct grammar (e.g. there are rules that mention `singular' and `plural'), whereas derivational morphology creates new lexemes which are grammatically indistinguishable from underived members of the same word classes (e.g. apart from their morphology, the grammar does not distinguish derived nouns like PAINTING from simple ones like BOOK).

Inflectional morphemes are always 'outside' derivational ones; e.g. the plural of PAINTING is {paintings}, not {paintsing}.

In grammar the difference between derivational and inflectional morphology lies in the relation 'whole', which is reserved for inflectional morphology. A word's whole is its fully inflected form, so this can only be produced by inflectional morphology; so what inflectional morphology has to explain is whatever differences there may be between the word's whole and its `stem' - e.g. the difference between the stem {dog} and the whole {dogs}. This difference is a matter of inflectional morphology because it is due to the inflection Plural.

In contrast, derivational morphology is only concerned with stems, not wholes. It explains the relations between the stems of different lexemes, for example, the relation between {dog} and {doggy}, which are stems of different lexemes.

Both derivational and inflectional morphology may use the same morphemes and morphological patterns, so these are best described separately. In WG they are described in terms of x-forms; e.g. the 'ing-form' of an English word may be used as:

the whole of an active participle (e.g. He was walking.) - inflectional

the stem of an adjective (e.g. an interesting book) - derivational

the stem of a noun (e.g. a drawing) - derivational

Task 2. a) Do you remember what the following is:

reduplication

incorporation

alternations

stress shift

affixation

blending (telescoping)

clipping

compounding

conversion

zero derivation

agglutination

inner inflection

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