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
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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. Indonesian expresses
plural by reduplication, as shown in (7) (examples from Sneddon 1996:16). It
certainly appears as if this language has an inflectional plural for nouns:
(7) kuda-kuda ‘horses’
rumah-rumah ‘houses’
singkatan-singkatan ‘abbreviations’
perubahan - perubahan ‘changes’
There is a catch: The forms in (7) are not obligatory. Speakers of Indonesian have the
option of using the unreduplicated form to refer to either singular or plural. So kuda
not only means ‘horse’, but also ‘horses’; rumah can refer to one house or more than
one, and so on. The reduplicated plural is most likely to be used when the number of
the noun is not clear from the context, as in the examples below (Sneddon 1996:17):2
(8) a. Rumah-nya dekat pohon-pohon mangga itu
house- 3SG.POSS near tree- REDUP mango that
‘His house is near those mango trees’
b. Pada pinggang-nya terikat bumbung- bumbung kosong
LOC waist- 3SG.POSS PASS.tie water.container-REDUP empty
‘At his waist are tied empty bamboo water containers’
Without reduplication of pohon, (8a) would be ambiguous between ‘His house is near
that mango tree’ and ‘His house is near those mango trees’; likewise, if bumbung
were not reduplicated in (8b), the sentence could have the interpretation, ‘At his waist
is tied an empty bamboo water container’, as well as the one given above.3
It is possible to say that Indonesian has the category plural in the syntax, but
because speakers are under no obligation to express it morphologically, it is not an
INFLECTION 119
inflectional feature of the language. We only talk about inflection when speakers of a
language are obliged to express that category morphologically. In English, plural is an
inflectional category because its expression is obligatory. Even when it is obvious that
a noun is plural, such as when it is preceded by a plural word, the noun must have a
plural form. We must say I own two dogs, never *I own two dog.
So far we have argued that for something to be classified as morphological
inflection, it has to be overt and obligatory. There is a third condition. Since we have
characterized inflection as bending the shape of a single lexeme, we talk about
inflection only when dealing with bound forms. Let’s go back to English. English has
a syntactic category of modals like can, may, must, so called because they express
moods. Should we consider these modals to be inflection? The answer is no. In order
to be classified as morphological inflection, a syntactic category must be expressed
through bound forms. In the case of the English modals, we are not dealing with
bound forms, but rather with separate words. Again, syntacticians differ from
morphologists on this point. Many treat auxiliaries as part of the inflectional system
of a language.
4.1.3 A Disease Model of morphology
It is reasonable to look at morphology as a disease. A few languages escape it
entirely; some languages have minor cases of the disease; in others it is pervasive. It’s
when dealing with the third group that we can talk of languages ‘living with
morphology’. For example, it turns out that the languages of the Athapaskan family,
such as Navajo, Apache, Hupa, Chipewyan, or Sarcee, have been living with very bad
cases of morphology for thousands of years. Yet somehow they’ve managed to
survive.
120 CHAPTER FOUR
So what do we mean by some languages having morphology worse than
others? Let’s look at English inflection. And let’s ask how much inflection English
really has. Nouns have only two forms. They have a bare form, like umbrella, and a
suffixed form, like umbrellas. Some people will tell you that English nouns have three
forms, singular, plural, and possessive, but don’t be fooled: the plural, the possessive,
and the plural possessive are identical in speech (though in writing, we use an
apostrophe, which is an innovation dating from Shakespeare’s time, to distinguish the
possessive form). We call this lack of morphological distinction among syntactically
differentiated forms inflectional homophony. Almost every English verb has four
forms: X, X-s, X-ed, and X-ing. A few, like break, have five forms because the
preterite (in this case, non-affixal) and the past participle have distinct forms (broke,
broken). A few very common verbs have an irregular third person singular present
tense form (has, does, says).4 And one, be, has eight (be, am, is, are, was, were, been,
being). English pronouns have four forms, for example, I, me, my, mine. All in all,
English has a fairly trivial case of inflection.
An intermediate case might be German. An average German noun has from
two to four forms, while adjectives have a few more. German verbs may have up to
about fifteen forms. Latin has a much worse case of morphology, with rich
inflectional paradigms for nouns, pronouns, adjectives, demonstratives, and verbs. A
typical Latin verb, depending on how you count, might have about 125 forms. Your
average Navajo verb, with inflectional marking for subject, object, as well as tense,
mood, or aspect, has approximately 4,000 forms. All that we are trying to point out is
that some languages have rich inflection, and others, like English, have rather poor
INFLECTION 121
inflection, from a morphologist’s point of view. Again, from a syntactic point of
view, it’s a whole different story.
Recall that we said that lexemes bend to fit syntactic frames. What kinds of
things do they express? In general we speak of lexemes expressing morphosyntactic
information. This includes the abstract syntactic categories of tense, aspect, number,
and case. Specific values for these categories, such as past, imperfective, plural, or
genitive, are generally referred to as morphosyntactic features or morphosyntactic
properties, the latter a term from Matthews (1991). Syntacticians sometimes call
these things morphemes, even when not overtly realized. For example, a syntactician
might refer to the present morpheme in Chinese. Here, however, we will stick to our
terminology and call them properties or features. Inflection expresses these properties
or features by changing the shape of the lexeme.
4.1.4 Inflection as morphological realization
Linguists often talk about inflection as the phonological realization of
morphosyntactic properties. In some sense, inflection makes these properties
detectable by giving them a physical manifestation — it turns them into actual
acoustic signals.
To return to English, mood — expressed by modals like can, may, and must
— is an abstract syntactic category all right; it is being realized, and it is obligatory.
So we are not talking about Chinese here, or Indonesian. But note that it is not being
realized morphologically, through the bending of a lexeme. From the morphology’s
point of view, this is not inflection. From the syntax’s point of view, it is.
We will just mention in passing some interesting problem cases. One involves
languages where inflection is obligatory in some contexts, but impossible in others. In
122 CHAPTER FOUR
Jóola we will see (cf. 4.2.2) that subject agreement is obligatorily expressed, except in
the past subordinate and positive imperative forms of the verb. In some related
languages, like Balanta, however, verbs agree with their subject in some contexts, but
not in all. In Balanta, verbs may be marked for subject agreement, but generally only
in the absence of a subject noun phrase (9a). When a subject noun phrase is
expressed, a subject prefix on the verb indicates that the subject is focused (9b) (data
from N’Diaye-Corréard 1970: 30):
(9) a. b´- ≠a¤aN be¤nte
CL2-people come
‘The people came’
b. b´- ≠a¤aN b´- do¤olo! b´- beeTa ma
CL2-people CL2-few CL2-see 3SG.OBJ
‘A FEW PEOPLE saw him.’
Another interesting case is the Central Khoisan language //Ani, which displays an
interesting system of object agreement (Vossen 1985).5 Finite verbs (except in the
imperative) bear affixes that agree with a pronominal object in person, gender, and
number (10a) or with a nominal object for number and gender (10b):
(10) a. ti$ tsa! mu)-tiŸ- teŸ
me you see-1SG-PRES
‘You see me’
b. gúénì=kÓòè-//ùà ?xóà- mà- /à !xòè-!xòè - `m- tè