A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

.-: Morphology: words and lexemes

I Inflectional morphology and lexical morphology 264

2 Basic concepts in inflectional morphology 265

3 Some general spelling rules 269

4 Verb inflection 273

5 Noun inflection 277

6 Grade 280

7 Lexical morphology 281

1 Inflectional morphology and lexical morphology

Morphology deals with the composition and internal structure of

words, and the way that structure determines the word meaning, rather than the way

they combine to make larger units like phrases and clauses. We divide the topic into

inflectional and lexical morphology.

Inflectional morphology deals with the differences between the shapes of the

inflectional forms of variable lexemes; for example, the formation of the verb-forms

endangers, endangered and endangering from the lexical base endanger.

Lexical morphology deals with the formation of lexical bases - with the forma­

tion of endanger, for example, from en· and danger. This includes the formation of

the lexical bases of invariable lexemes, such as cleverly. This doesn't inflect (there

are no forms *cleverlier or *cleverliest), but the fact that it is made up out of clever

and ·Iy is a fact of lexical morphology.

The motivation for dividing morphology into these two branches can be illus­

trated by means of an example such as the following:

[I] LEXEME

i fri end (N):

ii fri endly (Adj):

fr iend

fr iendly

INFLECTIONAL FORMS

fr iends fr iend's

fr iendlier fr iendliest

fr iends '

Within each of the two rows, the different words are inflectional forms of the same
lexeme. But row [i] lists forms of a different lexeme from row [ii]. Most ordinary
dictionaries would have just two entries to cover these words: one for the noun
friend and one for the adjectivefriendly.
Inflectional morphology deals with the horizontal relationships in [1]: the differ­
ent shapes that share the lexical base of a lexeme. In [i] the shapes are based on
friend; in [ii] the shapes are based onfriendly.

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