Basic English Syntax with Exercises

productive morpheme

1.3.4.3 Adjectives

We need not go into this any further. The main point that concerns us here is that the less productive nature of these adjectival morphemes makes them less reliable as a test for adjectival status than we have seen in the case of verbs and nouns. Obviously, if a word can appear in a comparative or superlative form, it is an adjective, but failure to do so cannot automatically lead us to a negative conclusion.

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: