Word CategoriesAlthough some of these may sound strange concepts, they are perfectly acceptable
forms. The idea–ideas case is the most straightforward. The distinction between these
two words is that while the first refers to a single thing, the second refers to more than
one of them. This is the distinction between singular and plural and in general this
distinction can apply to virtually all nouns. Consider a more strange case: friendliness–
friendlinesses. What is strange here is not the grammatical concepts of singular or
plural, but that the semantic distinction is not one typically made. However, it is
perfectly possible to conceptualise different types of friendliness: one can be friendly
by saying good morning to someone as you pass in the street, without necessarily
entering into a deeper relationship with them; other forms of friendliness may demand
more of an emotional commitment. Therefore we can talk about different
friendlinesses. By contrast, consider the following, based on the words in (9):
(11) conceptualises
atmospherics
warms
friendlies
negotiates
While not all of these words are ill formed by themselves, none of them can be
considered to be the plural versions of the words in (9). These words simply do not
have a plural form. Plural forms are restricted to the category noun and other
categories do not have them.
What we have been looking at in the above paragraph is the morphological
properties of words: the various forms we find for different words. Often morphemes
constitute different pieces of words: the form ideas can be broken down into ‘idea’ and
‘s’, where the second piece represents the plural aspect of the word and is called the
plural morpheme. The point is that only words of certain categories can host
morphemes of certain types. Consider warms from (11). This, too, breaks down into
two pieces, ‘warm’ and ‘s’. But the ‘s’ here is not the plural morpheme but another one
which expresses something entirely different. This is the morpheme we get on words
like hits, sees, kisses and imagines and it represents present tense, which has a number
of meanings in English ranging from the description of what is taking place at the
present moment to something that habitually happens:
(12) a the groom kisses the bride (commentary on a video of a wedding)
b John hits pedestrians only when he’s not paying attention
Note that this morpheme cannot go in any of the words in (8) (except for weather, a
fact that we will return to): ideas is not the present tense form of the word idea.
Essentially then, different categories of words have different morphological properties
and therefore one can distinguish between categories in terms of what morphemes they
take: if it has a plural form, it is a noun and if it has a present tense form it is a verb.
It should be noted however, that there are a number of complications to the simple
picture given above. First, it should be pointed out that morphological forms are not
always uniformly produced. For example, compare the following singular and plural
forms: