Inflection and inflection in English
3rd lecture in Morphology
Key concepts and a rough plan:

What is inflection

word classes, paradigms, categories, word-forms

basic allomorph, underlying representation

productivity

declination/conjugation, traditional grammar

synchronic and diachronic analysis

nouns, pronouns (personal – subject and object case, possessive and demonstrative) ,
adjectives (comparison and possessive adjectives), verbs

adverbs, prepositions, articles
The processes of lexical or derivational morphology create “new” words in the sense of
lexeme. That is, the produced word will be separately listed in the dictionary with its own
properties. For example, the sequence: nation, national, nationalize, nationalization, will
all have separate entries in a dictionary.
If, in contrast, we observe the sequence eye, eyes it is obvious that these words (word-forms)
will be listed under one entry, as components of this lexeme’s paradigm. This word is a
noun and we attach suffix –s to nouns to show plurality. This morphological process belongs
to the inflectional morphology. We may define this branch of morphology as the branch
that deals with paradigms. It is concerned with two things: with the semantic oppositions
among morpho-syntactic categories, on the one hand, and on the other, with the formal
means, including inflections, that distinguish them.
What are morpho-syntactic categories?
In a sentence, syntax requires a certain class of words to be chosen for a certain sentence slot.
For example, a noun in an active sentence is required to “start” the sentence, since the
unmarked sentence structure in English is S-V-O, and subject slot must be fulfilled by a
noun. Also, syntax requires this noun to be either in singular or in plural. In these sentences:
This boy is loud.
These boys are loud.
We cannot exchange the noun boy for boys or vice versa, because the syntactic features
require this noun to be in singular and plural, respectively. This is the –syntactic part of the
category. The morpho- part can be explained by the –s which marks the category of
number, that is, the morphological means to show the required member of this category,
which in this case is plural. Morphs that are used to show a member of a category are called
markers. In English, in the category of number, singular is not marked, while plural is
marked with –s (this will be discussed further on).
Obviously, categories will be different for different word-classes. Let us consider categories
that apply to the word classes in English:

Nouns – number (singular + plural); possession. In many other languages, the
inflecting ones (English is mainly isolating and has lost majority of its inflections)
nouns also have categories of gender and case.

VERBS – tense, person, participles (which can also be assigned to adjectives). In
Serbian, for instance, verbs also have categories of gender and number (One su
radile).

ADJECTIVES – comparison. In Serbian, adjectives have all the categories like
nouns (zut sto, zuta stolica, zuto sunce, zuti stolovi, zute stolice i zuta sunca; na
plavom stolu, na plavim stolovima)

PRONOUNS - number, (remnants of) case, possession

ADVERBS – comparison

ARTICLES, PREPOSITIONS, etc are not subject to such morpho-syntactic
changes
In the traditional grammar, the components of each of these paradigms (all cases of a certain
noun in Latin, for example) belong to declinations, while verbal changes are called conjugations.
NOUNS
NUMBER
As stated above, nouns in English have the category of number. This means that the (only)
morpho-syntactic process is one of marking the plural form of a certain noun (which has to be
countable, of course). The marker of plurality is morpheme –s. So, the paradigm of some nouns
is as follows:
sg.
table
sea
church
cat
pl.
tables
seas
churches
cats
All these words are word-forms of the respective nouns. But let us look at some different nouns.
sg.
goose
man
child
foot
ox
pl.
geese
men
children
feet
oxen
These are what we call “irregular” plurals. What is the marker for such categories? No linguist
has ever answered this question and got the approval of the entire linguistic population. It is
accepted, though, that the marker for such plural still is morpheme –s, but the realization is
different from x+s (cat+s=cats). That is why we say that –s is the underlying representation,
that is, it is the basic allomorph. Graphically this can be represented:
goose+s=geese, man+s=men, and so on. This is only one way of treating this “irregularity”, the
reasons for which lie in the history of the English language, and synchronic analysis cannot help
us.
Diachronically speaking, if we look back at the times of old Gaelic barbarians, there were other
morphological processes that applied to nouns to create plurals, and even cases. Most of these
have died out in the process of the evolution of the language. The “irregular” plurals that we
have today are actually remnants of the once productive processes.
Productivity is a term that is very important in morphology. When we talk about the
productivity of an affix, we say how active this process is. So, the plural marker –s has great
productivity, that means, that if we know that a certain word is a noun, we can add –s to make
the plural form, and not make a mistake. We will only use other allomorphs if we are explicitly
said to do so. These “irregularities” will be listed in the dictionaries, as they constitute lexical
properties of the given nouns. The usage of these specific allomorphs (-en in oxen) is lexically
conditioned, that is.
We have already mentioned phonologically conditioned allomorphs, which in the case of the
plural marker –s are /s/, /z/ and /iz/, depending on its phonological environment. When we take
into account the distribution of these allomorphs, it is easy to notice that the representaion /z/ is
by far the most frequent. That is the reason why we can not only say that –s is the underlying
representation, but we can be even more specific, and say that /z/ is the basic allomorph of the
category of number in English.
Some changes in spelling are characteristic of the –s suffixation in English (whether it be the
plurality marker, the marker of possession, or the person marker in the verbal paradigm),
however, they will not be discussed here, since they are merely an orthographic convention,
which in most cases is “unnecessary” (dictionary-dictionaries, why not dictionarys?), while in
some cases the spelling change represents the phonological change, such as voicing in the nouns
ending in –f. Here, the most frequent allomorph /z/ actually made the final consonant voiced, and
not vice versa. Compare:
wolf – wolves (/z/ voiced the voiceless /f/) cat – cats (the voiceless /t/ devoiced /z/ into /s/)
POSSESSION
It is difficult to assign the category of possession to nouns.
Pete’s book fell to the floor.
Pete’s here is a determiner, it describes the noun book. In that respect, it has the function of an
adjective. However, let us just not forget that by adding a certain morpheme to the noun, we have
achieved and fulfilled a certain morpho-syntactic function. This is a great topic for discussion –
should this be discussed as a nominal or adjectival inflection, or is it inflection at all?
As in any –s suffixation, the phonological rules to pronunciation apply. Note: when applying ‘s
to plural nouns marked with –s (or other nouns ending in –s), the only adaptation is
orthographical, where we opt for the marker ‘: That is James’ book. The pronunciation is either
/dзeimziz/, to reflect the underlying representation of ‘s, or /dзeimz/ where it reflects the
orthography of the word more closely.
VERBS
In the morpho-syntactic categories of the English verbs the following aspects must be discussed:

3rd person marker in the present tense

past tense forms (preterit)

past participle forms

suppletion – suppletive alterations

present participle forms
Compared to inflecting languages, English verbal inflection is reduced to such an extent that not
much discussion is needed. The difficulty of learning the English tenses however, reflects mostly
in their usages. However, here we have to peek into the historical linguistics again, to explain
some of the difficulties. Let us begin from the beginning.
The conjugation of the English verbs in the present simple tense goes as follows:
singular
plural
1st person
work
work
2nd person
work
work
3rd person
works
work
Here we can see that the only marked person is 3rd person singular, which carries the all-time
favorite –s suffix. This applies to most verbs. Also, all spelling alterations will apply to verbal –s
suffixation (carries, boxes, etc). Also, note the change when verbs end in –o (does, goes).
However, some verbs, and for that matter, very basic ones, have very unpredictable conjugation
in English. In the present tense, that is verb to be.
1st person
singular
plural
am
are
2nd person
are
are
3rd person
is
are
How can we explain this? It is not very easy from the perspective of the synchronic linguistics.
We can see here that is is very different from both am and are, while are and am only share one
common letter. The conclusion here is that these forms do not originate form one root, although
they all are word-forms of the lexeme be. When this happens, when we take different roots to
constitute word-forms in the paradigm of a lexeme (all possible changes within the given
category), we call this suppletion, and the different forms suppletive alterations. Such
occurrences exist also in Serbian – try and compare adjective dobar. Usually, they come form
different lexemes that had similar meanings, they were actually synonyms that were contextually
conditioned. In the development of the language, these different lexemes were assimilated into
the paradigm of the dominant one.
There are some minor changes with have:
singular
plural
1st person
have
have
2nd person
have
have
3rd person
has
have
Try and solve this riddle yourselves!
As for the past tense forms (preterit), let us consider these paradigms:
singular
plural
1st person
played
walked
weeded
played
walked
weeded
2nd person
played
walked
weeded
played
walked
weeded
3rd person
played
walked
weeded
played
walked
weeded
We can see that the past tense forms are only marked for that – for preterit. There are no separate
markers for either number or person. The underlying representation, or the past tense marker is –
ed suffix, with 3 phonetic realizations, that is phonologically conditioned allomorphs /d/, /t/ and
/id/, where the /d/ is the most frequent allomorph. The listed verbs belong to the category of the
so-called regular verbs. Their regularity comes from the fact that they take the –ed suffix, as does
the majority of the modern day English verbs. Therefore we can say that –ed suffixation is a
highly productive process. For the regular verbs, the –ed suffixation is a marker of the past
participle as well. We can now give the mathematical formula for the past tense formation in
English like this: V+ed=Ved.
However, there is a definite list (it does not expand any more) of verbs that do not follow this
pattern.
past tense
sg
pl
1st person
was
were
2nd person
were
were
3rd person
was
were
past participle
all persons
been
The past tense paradigm of verb to be is highly “irregular” that is, it shows suppletion, just like it
does in the present tense. Another very common verbs like this is go-went-gone.
There are many other verbs that also show irregularity.

see-saw-seen,

drink, drank, drunk,

sit, sit, sit,

think, thought, thought

grow, grew, grown

stand, stood, stood
The irregularity of these verbs can again be explained by the long forgotten morphophonological changes, that were probably no longer productive in the OE times. The relicts that
we have to day can therefore be considered the “real” English words, the original ones, and
should from now on be loved and cherished, and not despised because they have to be
memorized!
So, the conclusion is the following. All the “irregular” forms are still morphologically
correspondents of the suffixation with –ed, different realizations, different allomorphs. This is a
stretch, but most linguists will anyway accept that:
break + ed = broke
break + ed = broken
Some actually consider –en suffix the marker of the past participle derivations, and you might
find the following sign for the past participle forms: Ven. This is a convention to make the
distinction between past tense forms and past participles more visible.
So we have identified the –ed, that is /d/ morph as the basic allomorph, and then we can say that
word-forms such as broke, saw, done, etc, are lexically conditioned allomorphs – they will
always be listed in the dictionary as an inseparable property of the base lexeme – break, see, do.
As for the present participles, they can be viewed as both adjectival or verbal paradigms because
of their functions. However, since they are the products of verbal inflection, we will consider
them here.
Present participles are formed by the suffixation of verbs with the –ing suffix. This suffix does
not cause any major changes to the verb. It does not change the stress or pronunciation in any
way. To achieve this, some alterations in spelling have to happen, mainly the doubling of the
consonant following a stressed syllable with a short vowel: swimming, running, etc. As well as
omitting the final e, and some general spelling alterations.
ADJECTIVES
The main category which adjectives undergo morpho-syntactic changes is comparison. This is
the case in English, where nouns are also deprived of cases and gender. In inflecting languages,
adjectives have very complex paradigms, and in a noun phrase they have to agree with the head
nouns in number, gender and case. In English in the course of time, this was lost, fortunately for
us, foreign students.
There are two types of adjectival and adverbial comparison. One is inflective, the other is
syntactic, or phrasal. The difference is as follows:
big – bigger – (the) biggest
beautiful – more beautiful – (the) most beautiful
The first one is inflectional and is formed by suffixes –er and –est for comparative and
superlative forms respectively. The other type is called periphrastic, which means we achieve it
by adding other words, and making a phrase.
The two means of comparison are actually phonetically motivated, that is, short, monosyllabic
words can easily add on more syllables, while the already long, complex lexemes would rather
not be further extended. The case with most disyllabic words is that they can either take
inflectional or periphrastic comparison due to their “undecided” nature.
Some adjectival and adverbial comparisons are “irregular”, and again, these are high-frequency
words:
good – better – best
well – better – best
bad – worse – worst
Here we have suppletion once again – two or three different roots were used to form a single
paradigm.
PRONOUNS
Pronouns in English are the only words that reflect cases from the old times. Personal pronouns
have subject and object cases – nominative and non-nominative (what would in other languages
cover accusative, genitive, dative – actually all case that nouns can take that are not in the subject
position). They also show categories of person, number and gender, as can be seen in the table
below.
subject
object
possessive
possessive
adjective
pronouns
1st person sg
I
me
my
mine
2nd person sg
you
you
your
yours
him
his
his
her
her
hers
it
its
its
3rd person – he
male sg
3rd person – she
female sg
3rd person – it
neutral sg
1st person pl
we
us
our
ours
3rd person pl
they
them
their
theirs
Truly this table shows many things. It shows the declination of pronouns as well as their related
forms – possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns. Suppletive forms are easy to spot, as is
the link between the possessive ‘s in the paradigms of the possessive pronouns. These word
forms are also relics from the old times. The morphological processes that had produced these
forms have long been dead, as is the production of such words themselves. Remeber that
pronouns, adverbs, prepositions and some other grammatical, function words were in traditional
grammars caller “closed” items. No new members can be accepted.
There are also demonstrative pronouns, THIS – THESE, and THAT - THOSE. Similarly, the
plural forms here had been produced by once productive morphological processes and can now
only be listed as items that have to be learnt by heart.