Page 314 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes Inflection Morphology of English Verbs: In English language verbs can be categorised into three
categories:
1. Full Verbs: These are the main verbs in the sentence for example jump, hit, eat, walk, etc.
2. Modal Verbs: These are the auxiliaries like can, could, shall, should, etc.
3. Primary Verbs: These are both auxiliaries and full verbs. There are only three primary verbs,
they are be, have, and do.
Grammatical rules of morphological consequence which applies on English verbs are:
1. The Person and Number Rule: According to this rule there is a change in the form of primary
and full verbs depending upon the number and person of nouns.
2. The Tense Rule: This rule refers to the change in the form of verb depending upon the reference
of time in the sentence, i.e. past and present. Verbs do not undergo any changes in future tense.
Thus we have only two bound morphemes for this – PRESENT and PAST.
3. The Aspect Rule: This rule refers to the continues and perfect form of tense.
4. The Voice Rule: This rules about the active and passive voice of the verb. In active voice, noun
is the subject of verb by whom action has been performed and in passive voice noun becomes
the affected person and corresponds to the object of verb.
Paradigm of Full Verbs: Full verbs can further be divided as regular and irregular verb. Regular
verbs are those which have four forms. i.e. base (work), -s (works), -ing (working), and past
(worked). Irregular verbs are of two types: (a) those which appears in all five forms. For example
verbs like ‘ write’- write, writes, writing, wrote and written. (b) Those which appear in only three
forms. For example, verb like ‘cut’ has only three forms – cut, cuts, and cutting.
Paradigm of Modal Verbs: Modal verbs do not show any inflection due to the above four rules,
and thus they cause change in the forms of full verbs.
Paradigm of Primary Verbs: Primary verbs are used both as main verbs and auxiliary verbs.
Consider as sentence “What did he do?” here did is the auxiliary and do is the main verb. These
verbs change their forms according to the above rules. For example in person singular number ‘be’
becomes ‘am’ in present tense, ‘was’ in past tense; in first person plural number, second person
singular and plural number, and third persons plural number it becomes ‘are’ in present tense and
‘were’ in past tense.
Self-Assessment
1. Distinguish inflectional and derivational affixes in the following words:
(i) tributaries (ii) unclassified (iii) beginnings (iv) friendlier
(v) writer’s

23.3 Summary

• Morphemes can be both grammatical and lexical. Examples of free grammatical morpheme
could be articles. pronouns, etc. Morpheme like, plurals, past tenses, are also grammatical
morpheme, but they are not free because they cannot exist independently. It is true that
grammatical morphemes have no meaning in themselves but when they are attached to a
lexical morpheme, they modify the, meaning of lexical morphemes and thus produce a new
grammatical word. Let us discuss in detail, how morpheme functions in the formation of
words.
• Words can be cateogoriesed as simple, complex, and compound words depending upon the
nature of combination of morphemes. If there is just a realisation of a free morpheme, it can
be called as a simple word. A combination of free morpheme and grammatical or bound
morpheme and grammatical or bound morpheme will make up a compound word. There are
some cases wherein a complex word can be just a combination of two or more bound
morphemes. For examples, word ‘local’. ‘local’ is a combination of loc+al, linguistics consider

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