Inflections vrs. Derivations

Inflections vrs. Derivations

1. A change in or addition to the form of a word that shows a change in the way it is used in sentences: If you add the plural inflection "-s" to "dog" you get "dogs".

2. Refers to an affix that indicates a change of grammatical category. Take for example the word person-al. The suffix -al does not distinguish between grammatical forms of the same lexeme: person and personal are different lexemes, and personal belongs to a different word class (i.e. it is an adjective) from person (which is obviously a noun).

3. Some of the problems we might find in this topic are:

   • Theoretical assumptions, that is, an a priori distinction between lexemes and word forms. Sometimes they are hard to identify.
     • Haspelmath (2002) discusses several more distinctions between inflection and derivation, building on the narrow definitions given above. He groups the distinctions into two categories
       • ‘all-or-nothing’ criteria
         • His first ‘all-or-nothing’ criterion is basically the one we used to define our terms at the beginning: derivation indicates a change of category, whereas inflection does not.
       • ‘more-or-less’ criteria
         • That is, in his view, the ‘all-or-nothing’ criteria unambiguously distinguish inflection from derivation, whereas the ‘more-or-less’ do so to a lesser extent
       • obligatoriness
         • he saying goes that inflection is ‘obligatory’, but derivation is not.
           • By contrast, derivation is never obligatory in this sense, and is determined by syntactic context. However, some examples of inflection are not obligatory in the sense described above either.
             • For example, the concept of number is ultimately the speaker’s choice: she can decide whether she wishes to utter the form book or books based on the discourse context. Because of this, Booij (1996) distinguishes between two types of inflection, inherent and contextual.
               • INHERENT inflection is the kind of inflection which is determined by the information a speaker wishes to convey, like the concept of number
               • CONTEXTUAL Contextual inflection is determined by the syntactic context, as in (2). Keep this distinction in mind, we’ll come back to it!
               • Contextual inflection is determined by the syntactic context, as in (2). Keep this distinction in mind, we’ll come back to it!
                 • i. Inflection is found further from the base than derivation Example: in personalities we have the base person, then the derivational suffixes -al and -ity before we get the inflectional suffix -s. You don’t get, e.g. *person-s-al-ity
                   • ii. Inflectional forms share the same concept as the base, derivational forms do not. Example: person-s has same concept as person, but person-al does not.
                     • iii. Inflection is semantically more regular (i.e. less idiomatic) than derivation. Example: inflectional suffixes like -s and -ed indicate obvious semantic content like ‘plural’ and ‘past tense’, but it’s not always clear what derivational suffixes like -al actually represent semantically. Derivation, such as in the Russian dnev-nik (‘diary’, lit. ‘day-book’) is more idiomatic in meaning (i.e. you can’t work out its meaning from the sum of its parts).
                       • Basically, many linguists (e.g. Perlmutter (1988)) are keen to hold to a dichotomous approach to grammatical and lexical components in terms of how linguistic information is stored in the brain.
                         • There are several ways, but I’ll outline two of them here. The first is known as the Continuum approach
                           • As the name suggests, this approach entails that there is a continuum between inflection and derivation.
                             • The different types of inflectional/derivational affixes can be placed in an order according to how prototypically inflectional or derivational they are. For example, the -s plural suffix is prototypically more inflectional than the German diminutive suffix -chen.
                               • tripartite approach it attempts to account for the fuzziness of the inflection/derivation boundary while maintaining a distinction between the grammar and the lexicon. By dividing inflection/derivation phenomena into three rather than two
                                 • For example, ‘inherent’ inflection can account for lack of obligatoriness in inflection when this occurs, as well as accounting for the occasional base-inflection-derivation order, when that occurs. ‘Contextual’ inflection takes care of obligatory inflection and the usual ordering of base-derivation-inflection.
                                   • How Derivation is Used in Grammar
                                     • In morphology, derivation is the process of creating a new word out of an old word, usually by adding a prefix or a suffix. The word comes from the Latin, "to draw off," and its adjectival form is derivational.
                                       • IMPORTANT: note that one criterion for distinguishing derivation and ​inflection "is that derivation may feed inflection, but not vice versa.
                                         • "Derivational morphology studies the principles governing the construction of new words, without reference to the specific grammatical role a word might play in a sentence.
                                           • DERIVATION VRS. INFLECTION
                                             • Morphology may be divided into derivation—rules that form a new word out of old words, like duckfeathers and unkissable—and inflection—rules that modify a word to fit its role in a sentence, what language teachers call conjugation and declension."
                                               • The distinction between inflectional morphology and derivational morphology is Fundamentally, a matter of the means used to create new lexemes (derivational affixes among other processes) and those used to mark the role of the lexeme in a particular sentence (accidence, inflectional morphology).
                                             • Derivation, Compounding, and Productivity
                                               • "Word-formation is traditionally divided into two kinds: derivation and compounding.
                                                 • In COMPOUNDING the constituents of a word are themselves lexemes, this is not the case in derivation. For instance, -ity is not a lexeme, and hence taxability is a case of derivation.
                                                 • "Morphological patterns that can be systematically extended are called productive. THE DERIVATION of nouns ending in -er from verbs is productive in English, but the derivation of nouns in -th from adjectives is not: it is hard to expand the set of words of this type such as depth, health, length, strength, and wealth.
                                             • Changes to Meaning and Word Class: Prefixes and Suffixes
                                               • "Derivational prefixes do not normally alter the word class of the base word; that is, a prefix is added to a noun to form a new noun with a different meaning:
                                                 • Derivational suffixes, on the other hand, usually change both the meaning and the word class; that is, a suffix is often added to a verb or adjective to form a new noun with a different meaning:
                                                   • patient: outpatient group: subgroup trial: retrial adjective - dark: darkness verb - agree: agreement noun - friend: friendship"

4. UNIVERSIDAD MARIANO GÁLVEZ Facultad: Humanidades Carrera: Profesorado en Idioma Inglés Catedrática: Maria Elena Alvarez Nombre:Mariajosé Escobar Monzón ID 076-019-25540

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