Morphology; Inflection and Derivation

Inflection and Derivation

that a lexical item can appear in several grammatical forms, some of which carry inflections (overt grammatical markings).  It is essential to distinguish the process of inflection from the quite different process called derivation.

Inflection is the variation in form of a lexical item for grammatical purposes.

Derivation is the construction of a new lexical item from another lexical item, usually by the addition of an affix (a prefix or a suffix).

The definition of ‘word-formation’ in the previous paragraph raises an important problem. Consider the italicized words in (13) and think about the question whether kicks in (a), drinking in (b), or  students in (c) should be regarded as ‘new words’ in the sense of our definition.

a.       She kicks the ball.

b.      The baby is not drinking her milk .

c.       The students are nor interested in physics.

 The italicized words are certainly complex words, all of them are made up of two morphemes. Kicks consists of the verb kick and the third person singular suffix -s, drinking consists of the verb drink and the participial suffix  -ing, and students consists of the noun student and the plural suffix -s. However, we would not want to consider these complex words ‘new’ in the same sense as we would consider  kicker a new word derived from the verb  kick. Here the distinction between word-form and lexeme is again useful. We would want to say that suffixes like participial  -ing, plural -s, or third person singular  -s create new word-forms, i.e. grammatical words, but they do not create new lexemes. In contrast, suffixes like -er and -ee (both attached to verbs, as in  kicker and  employee), or prefixes like re- or  un- (as in  rephrase or unconvincing) do form new lexemes. On the basis of this criterion (i.e. lexeme formation), a distinction has traditionally been made between  inflection (i.e. conjugation and declension in traditional grammar) as part of the grammar on the one hand, and  derivation and compounding as part of word-formation (or rather: lexeme formation).

Let us have a look at the following data which show further characteristics by which the two classes of morphological processes, inflection vs. word-formation, can be distinguished. The derivational processes are on the left, the inflectional ones on the right.

Derivation	Inflection
Worker	(she) works
Useless	(the) workers
Untruthfulness	(is) colonializing
Interview	(we) picked
Curiosity	(the) children
Passivize	John’s (house)
Terrorism	Emily’s (job)

As a conclusion to our discussion of derivation and inflection, I have

summarized the differences between inflection and derivation:

Derivation	Inflection
Encodes lexical meaning	Encodes grammatical categories
Is not syntactically relevant	Is syntactically relevant
Can occur inside derivation	Occur outside all derivation
Often changes the part of speech	Does not change part of speech
Is often semantically opaque	Is rarely semantically opaque
Is often restricted in its productivity	Its fully productive
Is not restricted to suffixation	Always suffixational (in English)