A Word And Its Forms: Inflection

Nurul Fauziah Febriyanti 180410150005

Kinanti Fitri Febriani 1804101500
Mutia Rizky Amalia 1804101500
 4.1 Words and grammar: lexemes, word forms
and grammatical words
4.2 Regular and irregular inflection
4.3 Forms of nouns
4.4 Forms of pronouns and determiners
4.5 Forms of verbs
 let us consider the words performs,
performed and performance
(1) This pianist performs in the local hall every week.
(2) Mary told us that this pianist performed in the local
hall every week.
(3) The performance last week was particularly
impressive.
(4) *This pianist perform in the local hall every week.
(5) *These pianists performs in the local hall every week.
(6) *The perform last week was particularly impressive.
(7) The performer last week was particularly impressive.
(8) The concert last week was particularly impressive.
 We can describe the difference between
performance on the one hand and performs
and performed on the other by saying that the
latter pair are grammatically conditioned
variant forms of the verb perform, whereas
performance is not a variant form of the verb,
but rather a noun derived from it.
 Look at this sentence!
(9) These pianists perform in the local hall every
week.
Compared to number (1) it is awkward and
confusing to describe perform in (9) as a form of
itself ! We need a new term for the more
abstract kind of word of which the word forms
performs, performed and perform are all
inflectional variants. Let us call this more
abstract kind of word a lexeme.
Let us also introduce the convention that, where
the distinction is important, words as lexemes are
written in small capitals, while words as inflected
forms continue to be represented in italics. We can
now say that performs, performed and perform are
all inflected forms of the lexeme , and we
can describe the grammatical function of performed
by calling it the past tense form of the verb
. Equally, told in (2) is the past tense form
of the verb , and pianists in (9) is the plural
form of the lexeme .
Being abstract in this sense, a lexeme is not strictly speaking something
that can be uttered or pronounced; only the word forms that
belong to it can be. (For that reason, one could just as well use
or as the label for the lexeme ; but, by convention,
we refer to lexemes in English by means of their bare, unaffixed forms.)
The most straightforward way to define the term word form is to tie it
so closely to pronunciation that pronunciation is its sole criterion: two
30 AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY
word forms are the same if and only if they are pronounced the same, or
are homophonous. (Let us not be sidetracked by the fact that two words
can be pronounced the same but spelled differently in English, and vice
versa; in most domains of linguistic research, spoken language is more
important than written.) It follows that the same word form can belong
to two quite different lexemes, as does rows in (10) and (11):
(10) There were four rows of seats.
(11) One person rows the boat.
In (10), rows is the plural of the noun meaning line of people or
things, while in (11) it is one of the present tense forms of the verb
meaning propel with oars (more precisely, it is the form used with
subjects that can be replaced by he, she or it : so-called third person singular
subjects). Let us use the term grammatical word for designations
like the plural of the noun , the third person singular present tense
of the verb , and the past tense of the verb . It will be seen
that one lexeme may be represented by more than one word form, and
one word form may represent more than one lexeme; what links a word
form with a lexeme in a given context is the grammatical word that the
word form expresses there. This may seem complicated at first, but as
we discuss English inflection in more detail you will (I hope) come to
appreciate the usefulness of these distinctions.
4.2 Regular and irregular inflection
in other words, suffixing -s is the regular
method of forming plurals.
Such nouns, in short, are irregular in their
plural formation, and irregularity is a kind of
idiosyncrasy that dictionaries need to
acknowledge by indications such as (plural
teeth) here.
 For English nouns, there is no difficulty in
determining which is the regular method for
forming the plural. However, the very fact that
there is more than one method raises a
potentially tricky question about morphemes
and their allomorphs.
Morfem
allomorph
 A good way to avoid any confusion is to use
terms such as root, suffix and prefix,
wherever possible, rather than morpheme.
This is because, although there may be
disagreement about whether to treat these
plural suffixes as allomorphs of one
morpheme, everyone agrees that they are
distinct suffixes.
The term given to this phenomenon is
suppletion; go and went are said to be distinct
roots (and hence distinct morphemes), standing
in a suppletive relationship as representatives, in
different grammatical contexts, of one lexeme.
This view of suppletion, as a relationship
between roots rather than between allomorphs,
is consistent with the concrete view of
allomorphy outlined just now in relation to the
plural suffixes.
From the point of view of allomorphy, it may seem that go and
went- stand in just the same relationship as the plural suffixes -s, -en, -ae
and -i; hence, if the term suppletion is used for the former relationship,
it should be used for the latter too. In fact, however, suppletion is generally
applied only to roots, not to affixes. This is because suppletion is
generally seen as a relationship between forms of the same lexeme,
whereas allomorphy need not be. For example, the allomorphs wife and
wive- show up in forms of the lexeme , but the plural allomorphs [s],
[z] and [ z] do not belong to any one lexeme rather, they intersect with
noun lexemes in such a way that any one regular noun chooses just one
of these allomorphs, on the basis of the phonological criteria discussed
in Chapter 3.
 4.3 Forms of nouns
Most countable nouns in English have two word forms: a singular and a
plural. Inflectionally, for any noun lexeme X, there are just two grammatical
words, singular of X and plural of X, contrasting in number.
Thus, to the lexeme there corresponds a singular form cat, consisting
of just one morpheme, and a plural form cats, consisting of a root cat
and the suffix -s. This suffix and its allomorphs were discussed in the
previous chapter, and in this chapter we have noted that -s is the regular
suffix for forming plurals. Irregular suffixes expressing plurality include
-i, -ae and -a (as in cacti, formulae, phenomena) found with some relatively
learned words borrowed from Latin or Greek; the suffix -(r)en that shows
up only in oxen, children and brethren; and a very few others such as the
Hebrew -im in cherubim and kibbutzim. (These borrowings from Latin and
elsewhere are discussed further in Chapter 9.)
There are also some countable nouns that express their
plural with no suffix at all. I have already mentioned two
(teeth, men) where there is a change in the vowel of the
root or, more precisely, an allomorph of the root with a
different vowel from the singular. However, there are also
some whose plurals display not even a vowel change: for
example, sheep, fish, deer, trout. An obvious question,
therefore, is: if the plural and singular forms of these
nouns are the same, how can we tell whether they are
singular or plural?
The answer is: according to the syntactic context.
Consider the following examples:
(12) A deer was visible through the trees.
(13) Two deer were visible through the trees.
In (12) we can tell that deer is singular (more strictly, it represents the
grammatical word singular of the lexeme ) because it is accompanied
by the indefinite article a, which only ever accompanies singular
nouns (e.g. a cat, not *a cats), and because the form of found in (12),
agreeing in singular number with the subject a deer, is was, not were. In
(13), for parallel reasons, we can tell that deer is plural: the numeral two
accompanies only plural nouns (two cats, not *two cat), and the form of
in (13) is the plural were.
 The class of nouns which are unchanged in the plural (sometimes
called zero-plural nouns, if they are analysed as carrying a zero suffix)
could conceivably be just as random as the class of those with vowel
change (tooth, man, etc.). But in fact there seems to be a common
semantic
factor among the zero-plurals: they all denote animals, birds or fish
that are either domesticated ( ) or hunted ( ), usually for food
( , , ). It is true that the relationship is not hardand-
fast: there are plenty of domesticated and game animals which have
regular -s plurals (e.g. , , , ). Nevertheless, the
correlation
is sufficiently close to justify regarding zero-plurals as in some
degree regular, obeying a minority pattern of plural formation that
competes
with the dominant pattern of -s-suffixation.