LL 740: Structure of English

English Grammatical
Frameworks:
Inflections

Presented by:
Kimberly Mae DC. Rael
 INFLECTIONS AS AN ASPECT OF GRAMMAR

Grammar is the set of rules of any given language that enable us to construct any sentence in
that language which we recognize to be well-formed.

In other words, the grammar of English would enable us to construct a correct sentence such as
once upon a time three ugly frogs turned into handsome princes but would prevent us from
forming a sentence such as *ugly three frog once turn into princes upon a time handsome.
 INFLECTIONS AS AN ASPECT OF GRAMMAR

In addition to the syntactic rules in our grammatical knowledge, there is another set of rules
which tell us how to adapt words according to the grammatical context in which they occur.
For instance, in the well-formed sentence above you can see that, because there is more than
one frog and therefore more than one prince, frog and prince are both in the plural form and
this is indicated in writing by adding <-s> to the spelling.

Endings such as the plural marking on frog and prince and the past tense ending on turn are
known as inflections.
INFLECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH

One of the most important things about inflections is that they

are not used to create a new word or lexeme. When we add an
inflection to a base, however, it does not create a new word.

The brave man climbed the dangerous mountain.

The brave man climbed three dangerous mountains.

Inflections are used then to give us more grammatical

information about words. They can be used to indicate singular
or plural – what is sometimes known as number – and to
indicate tense.
INFLECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH

When considering inflections, it can also be helpful to use the

notion of a stem. A stem is what remains of a word when any
inflections are removed from it.

In contemporary English there are only a handful of regular

inflections in addition to quite a number of irregular ones.
Inflections can be found on nouns and verbs, on some
adjectives and adverbs, and – in a manner of speaking – on
some pronouns. Inflections, then, occur on all open classes of
words but only on pronouns as far as the closed classes are
concerned.
NOUN INFLECTIONS
Nouns can be inflected to show plurality and also to indicate possession. One interesting
feature of common nouns, however, is that they do not all have a plural form. Consider the
following examples:
An exciting game was taking place on the beach
Some exciting games were taking place on the beach

In schools, hockey takes place in the autumn term

In schools, *hockeys take place in the autumn term

There are also some nouns which don’t fit comfortably into either of these categories. First,
there are those which exist in the plural only. Examples of these include trousers and
scissors:
The trousers are ready to wear
* The trouser is in need of repair
The scissors are blunt
* The scissor is blunt
NOUN INFLECTIONS
A second group of nouns which are neither clearly count nor non-count nouns is the group
of aggregate nouns. These are nouns which refer to entities made up of several parts. Some
of these, like trousers and scissors, have no singular form, as with goods and dregs in the
following examples:
The goods are ready for collection
* The good is ready for collection
The dregs in a bottle of wine taste unpleasant
* The dreg in a bottle of wine tastes unpleasant.

There are also some aggregate nouns which look singular but take a plural form of the
verb:
The police have surrounded the building
* The police has surrounded the building
The cattle are lowing
* The cattle is lowing
NOUN INFLECTIONS
Some nouns have both a count form and a non-count one. This depends on the particular
meaning of the noun which is being employed. Wine is a good example of this. When we
talk of wine in the generic sense of a drink made from grapes then wine is a non-count
noun:
Wine is an alcoholic drink made from grapes
* Wines are alcoholic drinks made from grapes

When they take the plural form, count nouns have either a regular or an irregular ending.
Here are some examples of nouns which take the regular plural ending, sometimes known
as the -s plural:
singular form plural form
cake cakes
bun buns
gas gases

NOUN INFLECTIONS
In English, possession can be denoted by an inflectional ending, and in written English this
is most typically indicated by <-’s>. In the following example two nouns – the proper noun
Susan and the common noun dog – have possessive inflections: Susan’s brother was
preparing the dog’s dinner. Here, both Susan and dog take the possessive form.

Sometimes in English we use an of-construction rather than a possessive inflection, so we

might talk about either the journey’s end or the end of the journey. Sometimes, we
wouldn’t use the possessive inflection at all, so we might refer to the window of the
kitchen or to the kitchen window but never to the kitchen’s window.

NOUN INFLECTIONS
Possessive inflections can be added to both singular and plural nouns. Plural nouns can
also take this form although in practice the possessive form is often not discernible
because its spoken form is identical to the plural form.

It is also possible for the possessive inflection to apply to a word group rather than an
individual noun. For instance, in
The teacher spoke to Chris and Jonathan’s mother about their behaviour

Another term which is sometimes used when discussing noun inflections is case. These
inflections indicate aspects such as whether the noun is the subject of the sentence (the
nominative case), the object of the sentence (the accusative case), or the possessor of
something (the genitive case, hence group genitive as an alternative term for group
possessive) to give just three examples.
 VERB INFLECTIONS

Verbs are subject to a wider range of inflections although this range is still very limited in
comparison with languages such as French and German. When we were looking at the
plural forms of nouns we saw that there were both regular and irregular inflectional forms,
and this is also true of verbs. We will begin with the regular forms.

The uninflected stem of the verb is known as the base form of the verb. This form is also
referred to as the infinitive and we make a distinction between the to-infinitive (as in to
write) and the bare infinitive, which does not contain the particle to.
 The first of these verb inflections is the -s inflection which marks the third
person singular of the present tense as the following paradigm (or
inflectional set) shows:

singular
plural
first person - I walk
second person - you walk
third person - he/she/it walks
first person - we walk
second person - you walk
third person - they walk

The relationship between the verb form and the subject which precedes it
is one of concord (or agreement).

first person singular subject I like listening to Mozart

third person singular subject *Miriam/she like listening to Mozart
Miriam/she likes listening to Mozart

The second verb inflection found in English is again found on all verbs,
whether or not they also have irregular inflectional forms. This is the inflec
tion -ing: the base form of the verb plus the -ing inflection is known as the
-ing participle.
Fred was walking to the shops
I am hoping to go
to Australia soon
Following in his father’s footsteps was important to Bob
He was sorry for keeping them waiting

The third regular verb inflection is the -ed inflection which is used to
construct the past tense. Examples of regular verbs using this inflection
include: they walked, I gazed, she hoped and we admired.

The fourth regular verb inflection is the -ed participle inflection. It takes
the same form as the regular past tense inflection but we make a
distinction between these two inflections because their functions are
different and also because irregular verbs may have different forms for the
past tense and the -ed participle. Examples of the -ed participle might
include
They have walked three miles today
Jane’s painting was much admired by her friends
Considered carefully, it wasn’t a very good idea
Regular verb inflections

A comparison of the inflections of walk and take

Patterns of irregular verbs
The irregular primary verbs be, have and do
ADJECTIVE AND ADVERB INFLECTIONS

One of the qualities which both adjectives and adverbs share is their ability
to be graded. What this means is that we can indicate to what extent a
particular quality exists. For instance, we might say that a person is tall, or
extremely tall. We might say someone ran quickly or that they ran
incredibly quickly.

adjective tall
Rosie is tall
Esther and Jenni are taller
Laura is tallest

adverb fast
Rosie ran fast
Esther and Jenni ran faster
Laura ran fastest
Not all adjectives take the comparative and superlative inflections. If the word in question consists of three
syllables or more, then it will probably construct the comparative by using the premodifying adverb more and
the superlative by using the premodifying adverb most. Adverbs (as distinct from adjectives) which end in -ly
all use more and most:
Irregular forms of adjectives and adverbs
PRONOUN INFLECTIONS

Inflections in the truest sense of the term do not occur on function words, but the discussion of inflections
would be incomplete without mentioning the occurrence of suppletion in some personal pronouns. We saw
how the personal pronouns take different forms which we refer to as subjective and objective forms. They are
reproduced below:
PRONOUN INFLECTIONS

The terms subjective and objective are derived from the position in which the
pronouns typically appear: the subjective form normally appears in the subject
position before the verb and the objective form normally occurs in the object
position after the verb. So, the first person singular personal pronoun would
normally be I before the verb and me after it:
I saw Pedro
Pedro saw
*I Pedro saw me

However, in informal English we sometimes use the objective form in subject

position, usually when it is joined with another noun or pronoun:
Me and Jane are great friends
Jane and her went to Wimbledon together.
thank you for listening!