Inflectional morphology studies how changes to a word’s basic form affect its meaning. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of sound, and adding prefixes or suffixes can transform a word’s meaning. Internal vowel changes also affect meaning.
For linguists, inflectional morphology is the study of how inflections, or changes to the most basic form of a word, change meaning. For the rest of us, it’s a matter of plurals, time, and just plain common sense. Whether a word gains or loses a prefix or suffix, undergoes an internal vowel or consonant change to become plural, or is otherwise transformed is the stuff of inflectional morphology.
A morpheme might look like what certain types of children’s toys do when they’re transformed from a kitten to a space beast with the turn of a screw, but it’s actually a unit of sound. To be precise, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of sound in English or any other language. Some morphemes are single-syllable words, such as /bird/. While adding an s to the word doesn’t change its individual state, it does add another morpheme because /s/ also has a meaning; means “more than one”.
Words in English don’t just be their most obvious selves. Words that are nouns in one sentence can suddenly tiptoe up and dance like a verb in the next. Screwing a suffix can turn a word into an adverb, and adding a prefix to a noun or even a verb can give it a whole different universe of meaning. If that were not the case, English would need much more than the approximately 175,000 function words that make it up.
Prefixes like “pre,” “sub,” and “re” change words in unpredictable and sensible ways. If a group of people clap when a speaker is done, it makes a sound. If, on the other hand, the room rings with applause, it no longer resonates, it is overflowing with more sounds than it seems capable of containing. A scribe is trained to write well, but when the doctor prescribes, he does not work with people who are in school to be scribes but have not yet graduated.
Suffixes such as “ly”, “ed” and “ment” also change meaning through inflectional morphology. Adding the morpheme /ly/ to an adjective, for example, turns it into an adverb: He’s fast because he runs fast. While the morphemes /ed/ and /s/ can distinguish between past and present or how many people are doing something, the addition of the morpheme /ment/ turns an adjective into a noun, as in “gladness”.
Inflectional morphology is not just about transforming words into other words with prefixes and suffixes. It can also involve internal vowel changes that affect the meaning. “I sing every day” means that I sing today, I sang yesterday and I will sing tomorrow; I always have and always will. “I sang every day” means that, in the past, there was a period of time when I sang every day but I don’t do it anymore. The change of a single letter on paper or sound in speech stream makes a huge difference in what is meant.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
