5 Morphology and Word Formation key concepts

words
are units composed of one or more morphemes; they are also 
the units of which phrases are composed.
English inflectional morphology
Inflectional morphemes, as we noted earlier, alter the form of a word in or-
der to indicate certain grammatical properties. English has only eight inflec-
tional morphemes, listed in Table 1, along with the properties they indicate.
Except for {-en}, the forms we list in Table 1 are the regular English in-
flections. They are regular because they are the inflections added to the vast 
majority of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs to indicate grammatical 
properties such as tense, number, and degree. 
They are also the inflections we typically add to new words coming into 
the language, for example, we add {-s} to the noun throughput to make it 
plural. When we borrow words from other languages, in most cases we add 
the regular English inflections to them rather than borrow the inflections 

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Morphology and Word Formation
they had in their home languages; for example, we pluralize operetta as oper-
ettas rather than as operette as Italian does; similarly, we sing oratorios rather 
than oratori. [Thanks to Paula Malpezzi-Price for help with these examples.] 
The regular inflections are the default inflections that learners tend to use 
when they don’t know the correct ones (for example, growed rather than 
grew).
nouns: 
{-s} 
plural 
(the 
birds)
noun phrases:
{-s} 
genitive/possessive 
(the bird’s song)
adjectives/adverbs: {-er} 
comparative
(faster)
{-est} 
superlative (fastest)
verbs: {-s} 3rd 
person singular present tense
(proves)
{-ed} past 
tense (proved)
{-ing} progressive/present participle 
(is proving)
{-en} past participle 
(has 
proven)
(was 
proven)
table 1: the eight english inflectional morphemes
[Note: the regular past participle morpheme is {-ed}, identical to the 
past tense form {-ed}. We use the irregular past participle form {-en} to 
distinguish the two.]
However, because of its long and complex history, English (like all lan-
guages) has many irregular forms, which may be irregular in a variety of 
ways. First, irregular words may use different inflections than regular ones: 
for example, the modern past participle inflection of a regular verb is {-ed}, 
but the past participle of freeze is frozen and the past participle of break 
is broken. Second, irregular forms may involve internal vowel changes, as 
in man/men, woman/women, grow/grew, ring/rang/rung. Third, some forms 
derive from historically unrelated forms: went, the past tense of go, histori-
cally was the past tense of a different verb, wend. This sort of realignment 
is known as suppletion. Other examples of suppletion include good, better, 
and best, and bad, worse, and worst. (As an exercise, you might look up be, 
am, and is in a dictionary that provides etymological information, such as 
the American Heritage.) Fourth, some words show no inflectional change: 
sheep is both singular and plural; hit is both present and past tense, as well 
as past participle. Fifth, many borrowed words, especially nouns, have ir-
regular inflected forms: alumnae and cherubim are the plurals of alumna and 

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Delahunty and Garvey 
 
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cherub, respectively.
Irregular forms demonstrate the abstract status of morphemes. Thus the 
word men realizes (represents, makes real) the two morphemes {man} and 
{plural}; women realizes {woman} and {plural}; went realizes {go} and {past 
tense}. Most grammar and writing textbooks contain long lists of these ex-
ceptions.
As a final issue here we must note that different groups of English speak-
ers use different inflected forms of words, especially of verbs. When this is 
the case, the standard variety of the language typically selects one and rejects 
the others as non-standard, or, illogically, as “not English,” or worse. For 
example, many English speakers use a single form of be in the past tense 
(was) regardless of what the subject of its clause is. So they will say, We was 
there yesterday. This is an uncontroversial issue: was in instances like this is 
universally regarded as non-standard. Other forms are more controversial. 
For example, what is the past tense of dive—dived or dove? How are lie and 
lay to be used? How does your dictionary deal with such usage issues?