Basic English Syntax with Exercises

inflectional morpheme

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:

1.3.5.1 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.

5.3.1 The auxiliary as a dummy

What is the function of the auxiliary in these sentences? Note that the auxiliary bears some morpheme: in (162a) the tense, in (162b) the ing associated with the progressive auxiliary and in (162c) the tense on the first passive auxiliary and the en associated with the perfective have on the second. In these examples, the main verb cannot bear these morphemes for the simple reason that it is already bearing the passive morpheme and it seems a basic principle of English morphology that no word can bear more than one overt inflectional morpheme:

6.2.2 Do-insertion

Besides the bound morpheme status of the negative, these languages differ from English in that verbal stems are allowed to support more than one bound morpheme and hence there is agglutination: complex words being formed from a series of inflectional morphemes. The point is that in these languages the negative element behaves like we have seen certain English light verbs do and hence they offer support for the suggestion that the negative can be analysed as a light verb.