English morphology includes inflection and derivation, with regular and irregular forms. Morphemes are the basic units of language, either free or bound. Inflection expresses grammatical categories, while derivation creates new meanings through compounding, blending, and conversion. English has lost some inflections over time, but allows for creative word use across different grammar classes.
Inflection and derivation are the two fundamental elements of English morphology. Inflection refers to the patterns of word structures and derivation to words created with a new meaning. English has both regular and irregular morphology. Covers pronouns, nouns, verbs and adjectives in all their forms.
Morphology is the study of the internal structure of a word. The word morphology is not directly related to the word morph, as in to change, but comes from the word morpheme. A morpheme is the most basic, yet significant, unit in the English language. Morphemes can be free or constrained.
A free morpheme is one that has meaning when left alone. For example, “cat” is a free morpheme, as are “a” and “berry.” Bound morphemes are words or units that have no meaning by themselves. For example, “cran” and “sume” are related morphemes and must be combined with another morpheme to make something meaningful like “cranberry” and “resume.”
Inflection, in English morphology, is used to express different grammatical categories, even classes, using the same base word. With nouns, this means indicating the number and the possessive. With verbs, this means tenses like third-person singular, past tense, present-continuous, and perfect aspect. The inflection of the adjective is used to indicate the comparative and superlative forms.
Elements of English landforms have changed over time. Nouns, verbs and adjectives have lost their gender inflections, for example. Even old English verbs used to be divided into strong and weak verbs, which they no longer are. Nouns have also lost their connections to sentence function such as the dative and accusative forms. These now absent forms put English on par with European languages such as German.
Derivation in English morphology is similar to Noam Chomsky’s mergers. Chomsky defined merging as when two words are placed next to each other to create a new label or meaning such as “steam car” or “hot cocoa.” There are various ways of using English words to create new meanings. Two words can be put together in what is called compounding, they can be joined into one to make mixtures or change their class during conversion.
Simple compounds put two words together to create something new. For example, sky and diving combined created “skydiving” or dish and washing machine together created “dishwasher”. Any combination of nouns, verbs, and adjectives can be strung together to make new words like “redneck” and “checkmate.”
Blendings, in English morphology, refer to the combination of two words in which elements of one or both words are removed. This is a shortening of the word to make something more manageable. Examples of combinations include email plus to create “email” and web log plus to create “blog”.
Conversions change a word from one grammar class to another. For example, turn a noun like paper into a verb, “paper.” Nouns, adjectives and verbs are theoretically interchangeable in English. This gives writers creative opportunities that many languages don’t have, but that doesn’t mean they will be accepted as standard English.
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