5 Morphology and Word Formation key concepts

Exercise
Provide an analysis tree for each of the following words: retry, sink-
able, thoughtless, meaningfulness, microorganisms.
classifying
 
words
 
by
 
their
 
morphological
 
properties
Once the morphemes of a language have been identified, their allomorphs 
determined, and their distributions specified, we can use our analysis to as-
sign the words of a language to parts of speech. For many words, inflections 
provide the main basis of this assignment. Refer to Table 1 for the list of 
English inflections.
Nouns can be identified as those words that can be inflected for plural.
Verbs are words that can be inflected for 3rd person singular present 
tense, past tense, past participle, and progressive. These forms are often re-
ferred to as the principal parts of the verb.
Short adjectives and adverbs are words that can be inflected for compara-
tive and superlative.
Derivational regularities can also be used to classify words. We can, for 
example, classify as adverbs words derived from adjectives by the addition of 
the suffix {-ly}, e.g., quickly.
Classifying words on the basis of their internal morphological structure 
works only up to a point. There are lots of words that are not internally com-
plex and so cannot be classified without recourse to other types of criteria. 
For example, the preposition to has no internal morphological structure and 
so cannot be assigned to a grammatical class on that basis. Likewise, adverbs 
such as hard or fast lack the characteristic {-ly} ending. It becomes necessary 
to use other criteria to classify these and many other words. We consider in 
detail the principles which have been proposed for assigning words to parts 
of speech in the chapters on Major and Minor Parts of Speech in this book.
Exercise
1. Discuss two relatively reliable criteria (don’t use spelling) for distin-
guishing words from morphemes and phrases. Illustrate your discussion 

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Morphology and Word Formation
with appropriate examples.
2. Derivation displays a range of patterns in English. Discuss three dif-
ferent derivational patterns, illustrating your description with appro-
priate examples.