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Person Tense
Aspect
Number
Voice
Gender
Mood
Case Modality
1. PERSON
The languages are marked for the inflectional category of person: that
is, verbs exhibit different endings depending on whether the subject of the
sentence is the speaker (first person), the hearer (second person), or someone
else (third person).
2. NUMBER
In languages that have grammatical gender nouns are divided into two or
more classes with which other elements in a sentence – for example, articles and
adjectives – must agree.
Example :
Case is another grammatical category that may affect nouns (or whole noun
phrases). In languages that employ the inflectional category of case, nouns are
distinguished on the basis of how they are deployed in sentences, for example, whether
they function as subject, direct object, indirect object, as a location, time, or
instrument, or as the object of a preposition.
IN LATIN, FOR EXAMPLE, NOUNS
MUST BE INFLECTED IN ONE OF FIVE
CASES, WITH SINGULAR AND PLURAL
FORMS FOR EACH CASE:
5. TENSE & ASPECT
Tense and aspect are inflectional categories that usually pertain to verbs. Both have to do
with time, but in different ways. Tense refers to the point of time of an event in relation to another
point-generally the point at which the speaker is speaking. In present tense the point in time of
speaking and of the event spoken about are the same. In past tense the time of the event is before
the time of speaking. And in future tense the event time is after the time of speaking. This can be
represented schematically as in (13), where S stands for the time of speaking and E for the time of
the event:
In English, we mark the past tense using the inflectional suffix -ed on verbs (walked,
yawned), but there is no inflectional suffix for future tense. Instead, we use a separate auxiliary
verb will to form the future tense (will walk, will scream). The use of a separate word to form a
tense is called periphrastic marking. Strictly speaking, periphrastic marking is a matter of syntax
rather than morphology. Unlike English, Latin marks both past and future inflectionally, that is,
by means of morphology on the verb:
Aspect is another inflectional category that may be marked on verbs. Rather than
showing the time of an event with respect to the point of speaking, aspect conveys
information about the internal composition of the event or “the way in which the event
But in the passive voice the patient is the subject of the sentence, and it gets
the focus:
English lose all this inflection? There are probably two reasons. The first one has to do with the stress system of
English: in Old English, unlike modern English, stress was typically on the first syllable of the word. Ends of words were
less prominent, and therefore tended to be pronounced less distinctly than beginnings of words, so inflectional
suffixes tended not to be emphasized. Over time this led to a weakening of the inflectional system. But this alone
probably wouldn’t have resulted in the nearly complete loss of inflectional marking that is the situation in present
day English; after all, German – a language closely related to English – also shows stress on the initial syllables of
words, and nevertheless has not lost most of its inflection over the centuries. Some scholars attribute the loss of
inflection to language contact in the northern parts of Britain. For some centuries during the Old English period,
northern parts of Britain were occupied by the Danes, who were speakers of Old Norse. Old Norse is closely related
to Old English, with a similar system of four cases, masculine, feminine, and neuter genders, and so on.
“
THE ACTUAL INFLECTIONAL ENDINGS, HOWEVER, WERE DIFFERENT, ALTHOUGH THE TWO LANGUAGES SHARED A FAIR
NUMBER OF LEXICAL STEMS. FOR EXAMPLE, THE STEM B Ō T MEANT ‘REMEDY’ IN BOTH LANGUAGES, AND THE
NOMINATIVE SINGULAR IN BOTH LANGUAGES WAS THE SAME. BUT THE NOMINATIVE PLURAL IN OLD ENGLISH WAS B Ō
TA AND IN OLD NORSE B Ó TAR.2 THE FORM B Ó TA HAPPENED TO BE THE GENITIVE PLURAL IN OLD NORSE. SOME
SCHOLARS HYPOTHESIZE THAT SPEAKERS OF OLD ENGLISH AND OLD NORSE COULD COMMUNICATE WITH EACH
OTHER TO SOME EXTENT, BUT THE INFLECTIONAL ENDINGS CAUSED CONFUSION, AND THEREFORE CAME TO BE DE-
”
EMPHASIZED OR DROPPED. ONE PIECE OF EVIDENCE FOR THIS HYPOTHESIS IS THAT INFLECTION APPEARS TO HAVE
BEEN LOST MUCH EARLIER IN THE NORTHERN PARTS OF BRITAIN WHERE OLD NORSE SPEAKERS COHABITED WITH OLD
ENGLISH SPEAKERS, THAN IN THE SOUTHERN PARTS OF BRITAIN, WHICH WERE NOT EXPOSED TO OLD NORSE.
INFLECTIONAL LOSS SPREAD FROM NORTH TO SOUTH, UNTIL ALL PARTS OF BRITAIN WERE EVENTUALLY EQUALLY POOR
IN INFLECTION.
Languages anlaysis that considers the word as the most important unit in grammar.
We have now looked in some detail both at inflection and at derivation (or
lexeme formation, more generally). Remember that we distinguished the two sorts of
morphology in the following ways:
AFFIXES
What is Affixes?
An Affix is a morpheme that is attached before, after, or within to a word stem to form a new word.
TYPES OF AFFIXES
1. Prefix
The prefix un- attaches to adjectives (where it means ‘not’) and to verbs
(where it means ‘reverse action’), but not to nouns:
a. un- on adjectives: unhappy, uncommon, unkind, unserious
b. un- on verbs: untie, untwist, undress, unsnap
c. un- on nouns: *unchair, *unidea, *ungiraffe
2. Suffix
Ex: the plural formatives, -s, -en, -ing, -d, -er, -est, and –less, -ment, -ion, etc.
The suffix -ness attaches to nouns, as the examples in show, but not to verbs or
adjectives
Consists of two parts- a prefix and a suffix that together create a new word. The prefix and suffix
are not considered as separate.
5. Simulfix
A simulfix is a change or replacement of vowels or consonants (usually vowels) which changes the
meaning of a word:
Root: A root is the irreducible core of a word, with absolutely nothing else attached to it.
Stem: the stem is that part of a word that exists before the addition of any inflectional morpheme.
Base: Base is any unit of a word where any kind of affixes can be added. It could be both inflectional or
derivational.
The bottom-line: All roots are bases, bases are called stem in context of inflectional morphology
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