LING 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Word Formation

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1000
• Professor: Rosario Gomez

Document Summary

Topic 2. 6: rules of word formation: inflectional morphology. We discussed that function words express grammatical relations in sentences; these words are also free morphemes, for example pronouns (i, you, he, she, it, we, they), determiners (the, a, this, that), prepositions, conjunctions, etc. Grammatical relations are also expressed with bound morphemes through the use of inflectional morphemes. They add grammatical information to roots or bases, and they don"t change the category of the words like derivational morphemes do. English has a relatively small inventory of inflectional morphemes, compared to spanish or french, for example. Plural inflectional morphemes (suffixes in english) attach to nouns: ex. Book books: there are some irregular plural forms which are exceptions to the plural rule, ex. child children, goose geese. Sometimes the singular and the plural forms are the same: ex. Sheep sheep, fish fish: possessive morphemes, attach to noun phrases to express ownership. In english it is expressed with an "s: ex.