Basic English Syntax with Exercises

derivational morpheme

1.3.4.3 Adjectives

There is some debate about the status of this morpheme which revolves around the central issue of our present discussion. On the one hand, ‑ly might be taken as a derivational morpheme which is applied to a lexical item of one category to derive another lexical item of another category. This would be similar to morphemes such as ‑er in cook‑er, ‑ic as in scen(e)‑ic or ‑ment in govern‑ment. We have not been concerned with such morphemes so far as they tend to be rather restricted, applying to certain lexical items of a given category rather than to the category as a whole. There are, for example, no forms *exister (someone who exists), *viewic (the property of resembling a nice view) or *rulement (the collective body of people who rule). As we have been concerned in using morphological observations for identifying categories, the derivational morphemes would have been only of limited use to us. The important point about derivational morphology is that it takes place in the lexicon, forming new lexical elements from others, prior to any grammatical operation. If ‑ly is a derivational morpheme, then adverbs are a different category from the adjectives they are derived from. However, we have no feature analysis for adverbs using the [±F], [±N] and [±V] features and as we have pointed out we cannot just introduce a new category into the system without there being some fairly substantial consequences. If we introduce a new feature to try to accommodate adverbs, we predict the existence of a further seven more categories for which we have very little evidence.

1.3.4.3 Adjectives

However, ‑ly is strangely productive for a derivational morpheme, applying to many adjectives, though there are exceptions:

1.3.4.3 Adjectives

In many ways, then, this is like the missing plural *sheeps or the missing past tense *putted (as past tense of put, not putt, which is putted). As such fast is just an irregular adverb. In general, colour adjectives do not tend to form adverbs and the fact that this is a semantically well-defined class of adjectives indicates that there might be semantic reasons for it. This is further supported by the fact that colour adjectives that do form ‑ly adverbs, such as blackly, do so only if they have meanings that go beyond reference to the colour: blackly means ‘in a sinister or evil way’ and greenly can mean either innocently or enviously. Admittedly, the absence of size adverbs like *bigly and *smally is problematic given the existence of hugely and minutely. But putting this small number of problematic cases to one side, we can see that the ‑ly morpheme is a very productive one, applying to most adjectives. As pointed out above, most derivational morphemes, being lexical in nature, are not productive and apply only to selected lexical items.

1.3.4.3 Adjectives

The alternative to viewing ‑ly as a derivational morpheme it to see it as an inflectional morpheme. These are morphemes like the ones we have been mainly concerned with so far. These apply to a lexical word to give back another form of the same word. So see, sees, saw, seen and seeing are all forms of the same word, not different words created from a single source as are depart, department, departmental, departmentalisation. Inflectional morphemes on the whole are a lot more productive than derivational morphemes (though we have seen a certain degree of irregularity and exceptions in most of the morphemes we have investigated) and this would seem to fit better the productive nature of ‑ly. However, in what sense can an adjective and its related adverb be considered different forms of the same word, especially if they belong to different categories? If ‑ly is an inflectional morpheme, it seems that we would have to consider adjectives and adverbs to be the same category. There is a certain amount of evidence in support of this view however. First, note that both adjectives and adverbs have similar distributions, if we consider their immediate environment:

1.3.4.3 Adjectives

Interestingly, for adjectives the derivational morpheme ‑ly does not block the comparative and superlative morphemes, as we have seen:

1.3.4.3 Adjectives

This would seem to suggest that the two morphemes have different statuses and as the adjectival ‑ly is clearly a derivational morpheme, we might use this to argue that the adverb ‑ly is inflectional.

1.3.5.1 Inflections

One argument in support of this treatment of finite inflections concerns the difference between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes, discussed above. A derivational morpheme forms a new word from an existent one in the lexicon. This new word has lexical properties of its own and may even differ in its meaning from the original word. Furthermore, the process tends to be limited, applying to a selection of lexical elements rather than to whole classes. Inflectional morphology, on the other hand, does not change the lexical element, it just provides another form of that word. Often, it adds some element of meaning (such as tense or plural) to the meaning of the original word rather than changing the meaning to something else. This all suggests that the two processes are very different and that derivational morphology is something that goes on in the lexicon to expand the number of available words. Inflectional morphology is, on the other hand, too regular to be a lexical process, applying to whole categories. This would seem to be the hallmark of a syntactic process not a lexical one. We will assume therefore that verbal morphemes expressing tense and agreement are independent words inserted into a sentence in their own position and undergo a subsequent syntactic process which combines them with the verb that they are attached to.