Chapter 4: A word and its forms: inflection

Reference: Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, An Introduction to English Morphology

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Chapter 4: A word and its forms: inflection
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
4.6 Forms of adjectives
4.7 Conclusion and summary

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4.1 Words and grammar: lexemes, word forms and grammatical words
In this chapter we will focus on one variety: words that do not have to be listed because they are merely
grammatically conditioned variants of a word that is more basic, in some sense – and which itself may or may
not be listed, depending on whether its meaning is predictable or not.

(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.

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4.1 Words and grammar: lexemes, word forms and grammatical words
(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.

Ø performs and performed 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.
Ø Derivational morphology and inflectional morphology or inflection (which
deals with the inflected forms of words, that is the kind of variation that words
exhibit on the basis of their grammatical context.

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Lexemes
(1) This pianist performs in the local hall every week.
(9) These pianists perform in the local hall every week.

• it is awkward and confusing to describe perform in (9) as a form of itself! (it is

just a matter of grammar “plural”)
• 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

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Ø performs, performed and perform are all inflected forms of the lexeme
PERFORM
Ø we can describe the grammatical function of performed by calling it the
past tense form of the verb PERFORM

Lexeme: Word seen as an abstract grammatical entity, represented concretely

by one or more different inflected word forms according to the grammatical
context

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Word forms
• The term word form ties so closely to pronunciation that pronunciation is its
sole criterion: two word forms are the same if and only if they are pronounced
the same, or are homophonous.

• E.g. the same word form can belong to two quite different lexemes, as does
rows in:
• (10) There were four rows of seats. ‘line of people or things’
• (11) One person rows the boat. ‘propel with oars’

Word: fundamental unit out which sentences and phrases are composed
Word Form: Word viewed as a pronounceable entity representing concretely a lexeme in some
grammatical context (one word form may be shared by more than one lexeme)

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Word forms

Ø Grammatical word:
Ø for designations like ‘the plural of the noun ROW’, ‘the third person singular present tense of
the verb ROW’, and ‘the past tense of the verb PERFORM

Ø 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.

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4.2 Regular and irregular inflection
• it is not correct to say that dictionaries never have anything to say about
inflectional morphology.
Ø Two reasons for not listing a ward:
1. If a word is a noun that denoting a kind of thing that can be counted, then we
can be confident that it will have a plural form (Which means simply ‘more
than one X’, whatever X may be).
2. we can be confident ‘unless otherwise specified’ that the plural form of any
countable noun will be formed by adding to the singular form the suffix –s
(suffixing -s is the regular method of forming plurals).
• Examples of irregular plurals: CHILD has the plural form children. So,
dictionaries need to acknowledge by indications such as ‘(plural children)’

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 Suppletion

• Go - went - gone
• Go and went are distinct roots (and hence distinct morphemes “not allomorphs”,
standing in a suppletive relationship as representatives, in different grammatical
contexts, of one lexeme.
• ‘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 WIFE, but the plural allomorphs [s],
[z] and [Iz] 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.

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4.3 Forms of nouns
• Most countable nouns in English have two word forms: a singular and a plural.
A. Inflectionally, for any noun lexeme X, there are just two grammatical words, ‘singular
of X’ (cat) and ‘plural of X’ (cats) , contrasting in number.
B. Irregular suffixes: child- children
C. There are also some countable nouns that express their plural with no suffix at all
(man - men) “vowel change” vs. (fish – fish) “No vowel change”
D. ‘zero-plural’ nouns (unchanged in the plural) denote animals, birds or fish that are
either domesticated (SHEEP) or hunted (DEER)

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 4.3 Forms of nouns
• There are a few nouns such as SCISSORS and PANTS which exist only in an -s-plural
form, and which appear only in plural syntactic contexts, even though they denote single
countable entities, as is shown by the contrast between (14) and (15):
(14) a. Those scissors belong in the top drawer.
b. Your pants have a hole in the seat.
(15) a. *That scissors belongs in the top drawer.
b. *Your pants has a hole in the seat.

Ø This idiosyncratic lack of a morphological singular form (except in compounds such as

scissor factory) creates a problem in contexts where the syntax seems to require such a
form, as when the noun is preceded by the indefinite article a or an (*a scissor).
Ø there is a conventional circumlocution or periphrastic form:
That pair of scissors belongs in the top drawer.

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 4.3 Forms of nouns

• The singular–plural distinction is the only grammatical distinction that is expressed

morphologically in English nouns.

• the ‘apostrophe-s’ form: pianist’s, man’s, etc. – do these not count as further inflected forms
of the lexemes PIANIST, and MAN, namely ‘possessive’ forms?
• it is easy to show that what -’s attaches itself to is not a morphological unit such as noun
root (e.g. man) but a syntactic unit, namely a noun phrase: that man’s bicycle

Ø So -’s belongs in the study of syntax, not morphology.

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 4.4 Forms of pronouns and determiners
Ø some of them, like nouns, display a singular–plural contrast, and pronouns combine a
singular–plural contrast with contrast unique to them, between subject and non-subject
forms.

THIS, with singular and plural forms this and these.

THAT, with singular and plural forms that and those.

Ø words with a possessive meaning: his, our, my, her, your and their. these words fulfil just
the same role as noun phrases with the apostrophe-s. these words could be classified as
determiners, because they perform a determiner-like role and cannot be combined with
other determiners (we cannot say *the my hat). But these are issues of syntax rather than
morphology.

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4.3 Forms of verbs
1. basic form give Mary may give a lecture.
Mary wants to give a lecture.
Mary and John give a lecture every year.

2. third person singular present tense gives Mary gives a lecture every year.

3. past tense gave Mary gave a lecture last week.

4. progressive participle
5. perfect or passive participle
giving Mary is giving a lecture today.
given Mary has given a lecture today.
The lecture is always given by Mary.
(for any verb V, the grammatical words ‘perfect participle of V’ and ‘passive
participle of V’ are expressed by the same word form.)

• A verb lexeme has at most five forms. In fact, most verbs have only four forms, because
the past tense and the perfect (or passive) participle forms are the same. This is true for all
regular verbs (those that form the past tense with the suffix -ed),

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4.3 Forms of verbs

• When two grammatical words that are distinct for some lexemes are
systematically identical for others, as here, these forms are said to be syncretised,
or to exhibit syncretism.

• All Regular verbs (those that form the past tense with the suffix -ed)
• Some irregular verbs, such as DIG and STING (past = perfect participle dug,
stung) and all those that use the suffix -t, such as BEND, FEEL, and TEACH
(bent, felt, taught).

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4.3 Forms of verbs

Auxiliaries:

Instead of the usual verbal maximum of five forms

Ø Modals distinguish only two (e.g. can, could) or even just one (e.g. must), while
BE distinguishes eight (am, is, are, was, were, being, been, be).

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 4.3 Forms of adjectives
• Many English adjectives exhibit three forms, for example GREEN here:
(30) Grass is green.
(31) The grass is greener now than in winter.
(32) The grass is greenest in early summer.
• Irregular: good – better – best

• Broadly speaking, the suffixes -er and -est appear on adjectives whose basic form has one
syllable, or two provided that the second syllable ends in a vowel (e.g. tidy, yellow), while
longer adjectives usually require the periphrasis (more or most)

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 4.7 Conclusion
• the existence of inflected word forms does not have to be noted in the dictionary; however,
the word forms themselves must be listed if they are irregular.
• Inflection affects nouns, verbs, adjectives and a few adverbs, as well as the closed classes
of pronouns, determiners, auxiliaries and modals.
• However, the maximum number of distinct inflected forms for any open-class lexeme is
small:

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