BING 4316

English Morpho-Syntax
3rd Class : September 4, 2016

Siti Marina (Irin)

ukhtuka@gmail.com

Universitas Terbuka
Korea Selatan

MODULE 3

GRAMMATICAL
MORPHEMES AND
WORD CATEGORIES
Keywords:
Inflectional morphology
Exceptions
Suppletion
Inflection
Derivation
Word categories (nouns, verbs)
Modifiers (adjectives, adverbs)

Goals
Explaining and differentiating the meaning of
inflectional morphology, exception and
suppletion
Determining words by their words categories
Differentiating modifiers: adjectives and
adverbs

Inflectional Morphology
UNIT 1

Inflectional morphology
Marks relations such as person, number, case,
gender, possessions, tense, aspect, and mood.
Serves as essential grammatical glue holding the
relationships of word constructions together.
Manifests in the form of affixes (prefix, suffix, and
rarely circumfix and infix) or vowel change.
concerned with syntactically driven word-formation.

Word construction regards 3 morphemes:

Lexical
Derivational create new lexical items
Inflectional syntactically determined
affixation processes
still arguable, need to classify the criterion of the
two processes

Obligatoriness
Obligatoriness : to characterize inflection
Inflection occurs when, at different points in a
sentence, a syntax imposes obligatory choices from
a menu of affixes to avoid ungrammatical sentence.
Examples:
This book, these books (O)
These book, this books (X)
He gives me book (O)
He gives I book (X)
Note: Sometimes obligatoriness applies to derivation.
ex. I opened it awkward (X)
I opened it awkwardly (O)

Productivity
Apply to form appropriate paradigm
syntactically
Ex. Tense in verbs past tense

Imply generality, both in terms of form and

meaning
Note: Sometimes derivation such as suffix ly
also implies generality

Exception & Suppletion

Sometimes regular rule does not apply to some
word forms.
Example: child (s) children (pl)
man (s) men (pl)
come came come

Irregularity Suppletion
Example: ox oxen
fax faxen (although from clipping process of
facsimile)

Exception: loan words (foreign language)

datum data (from Latin language)
hit hit hit (zero-form morphemes, taken form
Hindu grammar)

Formative test 1
No
.

Sentences

1.

The porter opened the gate.

2.

The piglet in the cage looks so cute.

3.

We met a man.

4.

He was carrying a log of wood.

5.

The stable door was open.

Root

Inflectional
Category

Word Categories
UNIT 2

Word categories
Major
Noun
Verbs
Adjective
Adverbs

Minor
Conjunctions
Particles
Ad positions

Morpho-syntactic properties
of noun
The girl likes apple == the noun likes the noun
aspect of semantics and pragmatics
Distributional properties : how words are distributed
in phrases and clauses
The house is sold (house == subject)
They sold the house (house == object)

Structural properties
The possibility of taking descriptive modifiers (ex. red
shoes)
The use of genitive case pronouns (ex. her shoes)

Types of nouns
Proper noun (names)
Common noun
Collective noun (ex. army, herd, fleet)
Abstract noun (implies action, quality or state)
Mass noun (ex. sand, wood)
Count noun (ex. cars, apples)

Personal pronoun to avoid repetition in

sentence

Verbs
Transitive (action) and Intransitive Verbs (state
or being)
He ran a long distance.
(action)
The baby sleeps.
(state)
There is a flaw in this diamond. (being)

Another classification of verbs:

Weather to thunder, to rain
Involuntary processes: to grow, to die
Bodily functions: to cough, to sneeze
Etc.

Modifiers: Adjectives and

Adverbs
UNIT 3

Modifiers
Adjectives : words used with nouns to
describe or point out, the person, animal,
place or thing which the noun names, or to
tell the number of quantity and used with a
noun to add something for its meaning.
Adverbs: a word that modifies the meaning of
a verb, an adjective, or another adverb

Formative test 3
Modifying
N
o

Sentence

1. You are far too hasty.

2. The secret went out.
3. He is old enough to know
better.
4. I would much rather not
go.
5. You need to finish the
test completely.

Adver
b
Verb

Adjectiv
e

Adver
b

Kind
of
Adve
rb

Thank you

See you next

class!
Please prepare for Module 4