Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 427
INFLECTION
Bloomfield (1933, p. 222) referred to inflection as the outer layer of the morphology of
word forms and derivation as the inner layer. A simple example to illustrate what he
meant by this is that the natural morphemic segmentation of the word-form stewardesses
is as in (8), not as in (9) below:
(8) stewardess + es
(9) *steward + esses
In other words, inflections are added when all derivational and compositional processes
are already complete. The plural forms of motorbike and painter are motorbikes and
painters, not *motorsbike and *paintser. Inflections such as tense, number, person, etc.
will be attached to ready-made stems. Stems are the forms to which inflections may be
added, but which may already have derivational affixes. Examples of stems are repaint
(which can yield repaints, repainted, etc.) and computerize (which can give
computerized, computerizing etc.). Again, not all linguists agree on the use of these
terms. The various terms can be related by the following example of some possible forms
of the root paint:
root paint
affixes (re-)paint(-ed)
stem repaint(-ed)
morphs re-paint-ed
morphemes AGAIN-PAINT-PAST
Inflectional categories such as tense, voice, and number play an important role in syntax
and are called morphosyntactic categories, since they affect both the words around
them and the words within which they occur (see Matthews, 1974, p. 66). Inflectional
morphemes are very productive: the third-person singular present tense -s can be attached
to any new English verb; the same cannot necessarily be said about derivational affixes
(we can say rework and dismissive but not *rebe or *wantive, for example). Inflectional
morphemes are semantically more regular than derivational ones; meaning will remain
constant across a wide distributional range. Inflections create full conjugations and
declensions for verbs and nouns; unlike derivations they usually do not produce ‘gaps’:
whereas the past inflectional morph -ed can be attached to any of the verbs arrive,
dispose, approve, and improve in English, only the first three form nouns with the—al
suffix.
WORD FORMATION
There is broad, but not complete, agreement as to how the field of word-formation should
be divided up. Marchand (1969, p. 2) distinguishes between (1) formation involving ‘full
linguistic signs’, i.e. compounding, prefixation, suffixation, derivation by the zero morph,