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4.1 Inflection 4.1 Inflection Within a lexeme-based theory of morphology, the difference between derivation and inflection is very simple. Derivation gives you new lexemes, and inflection gives you the forms of a lexeme that are determined by syntactic environment (cf. 2.1.2). But what exactly does this mean? Is there really a need for such a distinction? This section explores the answers to these questions, and in the process, goes deeper into the relation between morphology and syntax. 4.1.1 Inflection vs. derivation The first question we can ask about the distinction between inflection and derivation is whether there is any formal basis for distinguishing the two: can we tell them apart because they do different things to words? One generalization that has been made is that derivational affixes tend to occur closer to the root or stem than inflectional affixes. For example, (1) shows that the English third person singular present inflectional suffix -s occurs outside of derivational suffixes like the deadjectival -ize, and the plural ending -s follows derivational affixes including the deverbal -al: (1) a. popular-ize-s commercial-ize-s b. upheav-al-s arriv-al-s Similarly, Japanese derivational suffixes like passive -rare or causative -sase precede inflectional suffixes marking tense and aspect:1 (2) a. tabe-ru tabe-ta eat- IMP eat- PERF INFLECTION 113 ‘eats’ ‘ate’ b. tabe-rare- ru tabe-rare- ta eat - PASS-IMP eat- PASS-PERF ‘is eaten’ ‘was eaten’ c. tabe-sase- ru tabe-sase- ta eat- CAUS-IMP eat- CAUS-PERF ‘makes eat’ ‘made eat’ It is also the case that inflectional morphology does not change the meaning or grammatical category of the word that it applies to. A noun with a plural suffix attached to it is still a noun; slurp means the same thing whether it is past or present; and so on. Derivational morphology may or may not affect the grammatical category of a word it applies to, and it typically changes its meaning. Glory is a noun, and glorious is an adjective. And while their meanings are related, they cannot be said to mean the same thing. A final generalization we can make is that inflectional morphology tends to be more productive than derivational morphology. Inflectional morphology can apply to words of a given category with relative freedom. Virtually any noun in English can be made plural with the addition of [z] or one of its two allomorphs. The only exceptions are those that have irregular plurals, such as children or phenomena, and those that logically do not allow a plural form: mass nouns like rice and abstract nouns like intelligence generally fall into this category. Despite these three generalizations, it turns out that in terms of actual morphs, it is hard to see what difference, if any, there is between inflection and derivation. Crosslinguistically, the forms of inflectional morphology and the forms of derivational morphology are usually not very different from one another. Both can be 114 CHAPTER FOUR expressed through prefixal, suffixal, or non-segmental means. For this reason, the difference between inflection and derivation is not so much a difference in form as a difference in function — what they do and what they tell us. The word inflection comes from traditional Latin grammar. It represents the idea that speakers bend the shape of a word so it will fit in a particular position within a sentence. Its root flect-, which we see in the English word flex, means ‘bend’. We really like to think of it in this way: every sentence is a syntactic frame with positions for a series of lexemes. In order to fill one of those positions, you take a lexeme and bend it to fit. What are the ways in which speakers can bend lexemes to make them fit into a certain syntactic slot? In languages like English or German, ‘bending’ generally means adding affixes, although in some cases affixation is supplemented or replaced by apophony, or vowel alternations, as shown below for English (3) and the Bernese dialect of Swiss German (4): (3) a. sing, sang, sung b. drive, drove, driven (4) a. suuffe [su…f´] ‘drink (inf.)’ gsoffe [g(sOf…´] ‘drunk (past part.)’ b. schwimme [S√Im…´] ‘swim (inf.)’ gschwomme [g(S√Um…´] ‘swum’ c. pfyffe [pfi…f´] ‘whistle (inf.)’ pfiffe [pfIf…´] ‘whistled (past part.)’ Another term for apophony is internal change. INFLECTION 115 When referring to English and other Germanic languages, the terms ablaut and umlaut often arise. These terms describe particular types of internal change that must be understood in a historical context. We use the term ablaut for apophony in verb paradigms, as in (3) and (4). Umlaut, on the other hand, is used to describe the apophony found in pairs like goose~geese or foot~feet. Umlaut differs from ablaut in that at one time it was a phonologically-conditioned alternation, with the high vowel in geese or feet resulting from vowel harmony with a high vowel in the plural suffix, which has since disappeared. In the Semitic language family, ‘bending’ often involves internal variations in a vocalic pattern, while the consonantal frame stays fairly stable. This is illustrated in (5) for the expression of number in certain Arabic nouns (examples from McCarthy and Prince 1990: 212, 217). The inclusion of the loanwords ‘film’ and ‘bank’ is to show that this particular way of forming the plural (referred to as the ‘broken plural’) is robust and productive. What all of the plural forms in (5) have in common is that they begin with the pattern CVCVV+: (5) Root Singular Plural Gloss jndb jundub janaadib ‘locust’ slt¢n sult¤aan salaa?iin ‘sultan’ ?nb ?inab ?anaab ‘grape’ flm film /aflaam ‘film’ nfs nafs nufuus ‘soul’ bnk bank bunuuk ‘bank’ The last type of ‘bending’ that we will mention here is suppletion. Suppletion is the morphological process that replaces one form with a completely different one in order to signal a grammatical contrast. In English, the paradigm for the verb be is 116 CHAPTER FOUR characterized by suppletion. Am, are, is, was, were, and be have completely different phonological shapes. We also find suppletion with pronouns; compare I and me or she and her. Suppletion is most likely to be found in the paradigms of high-frequency words, as seen in the following table: (6) Suppletion in some languages of Europe Language French aller ‘to go’, être ‘to be’ vais ‘go (1sg)’, suis ‘am (1sg)’ Spanish ir ‘to go’, ser ‘to be’ fue ‘went (1sg)’, fue ‘was (1sg)’ Finnish hyvä ‘good (nom. sg.)’ parempi ‘better’, paras ‘best’ Greek [Enas] ‘a, one (m.nom.sg.) [mja] ‘a, one (f.nom.sg.)’ Swedish ett ‘one’, två ‘two’ första ‘first’, andra ‘second’ We can look to historical linguistics for an explanation of why suppletive forms arise. Take, for example, the paradigm of the verb ‘to go’ in French. It comes from three different Latin sources. The infinitive, aller, and the first person and second person plural forms in the present, allons ‘we go’ and allez ‘you (pl.) go’, come from Latin ambula¤re ‘to walk, to walk along’. The stem of future and conditional forms, such as irai ‘will go (1sg.)’, has evolved from the Latin verb ire ‘to go’. Finally, forms like vais ‘go (1sg.)’ or vont ‘go (3pl.)’ come from Latin vadere ‘to go, to walk’. Thus we see that the idiosyncracies of languages today can often be explained by looking at the languages of yesterday. In certain cases, such as with catch~caught or think~thought and other verbs like them in English, it is most convenient to use the term partial suppletion. In these cases, the initial phoneme or phonemes of the word remain the same, but there is both INFLECTION 117 internal change and change to the end of the word (loss of segments and addition of a past tense indicator [t]). To summarize this section, ‘bending’ a lexeme here simply means ‘changing shape’. That’s all it means. Any change in form will count as inflection, whether it involves affixation or not. 4.1.2 Morphological vs. syntactic inflection The presence of inflectional morphology in a language depends on the existence of multiple forms of a lexeme. From a morphological point of view, if a lexeme has only one form, then you can’t get inflection. Take Chinese, a famous case of an uninflected language. Chinese lexemes have only one form, abstracting away from phonologically determined alternations (mostly changes in tone). While Chinese has a few clitics or particles, including one that expresses past tense, these are generally not considered to be affixes. The same is true of Vietnamese, though the two languages are unrelated. For the morphologist, therefore, these two languages have no inflection. Traditionally, they are described as isolating. From a syntactician’s point of view, whether or not Chinese and Vietnamese have inflection is an entirely different matter. Even if a language does not express a particular notion such as number or case, it is typically assumed to be present in the syntax. So a syntactician may argue that noun phrases in a particular language raise to check nominative case features, even though nominative case is not realized overtly. But from a morphologist’s point of view, if a particular notion is never realized overtly in a given language, then it cannot be called inflection in that language. A second condition for inflection is that the realization of a given category must be obligatory. What do we mean by that? Let’s look at a language that seems to 118 CHAPTER FOUR pay attention to a particular category but does not inflect for it.
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