8.1 English inflections

Over the course of its history, English has lost most of its inflectional moprhology. Inflection in English comes in three main forms:

  • affixation (suffixes only)
  • change in the root (mostly vowel changes)
  • no change in form

Verbs, except for modal verbs, inflect for the 3rd person singular (-s), past tense (-ed), and past participle (-ed/-en). There are several irregular patterns, but it is not the aim here to provide an exhaustive classification.

  1. regular: help — helped — helped
  2. ablaut: sing — sang — sung
  3. -en: take — took — taken
  4. irregular dental suffix: mean — meant — meant
  5. no form change: cut — cut — cut
  6. suppletive: go — went — gone

Ablaut used to be a more common pattern and can still be observed in other modern Germanic languages, such as German, and Dutch.

The question of whether -ing should be called an inflectional suffix is more complicated. In the formation of the progressive aspect, it behaves most like an inflection. Other participial uses could be analysed as adjective derivation, gerundial uses as noun derivation.

A similar question arises with nouns. The only clear case of inflection left is the plural (-s). When it comes to the possessive (-’s), it is not a matter of inflection vs derivation, but whether it is a suffix at all. Consider the following examples:

  1. my friend’s guitar
  2. a friend of mine’s guitar. link
  3. the guy you met yesterday’s car

From those examples, which are all likely to be considered well-formed by native speakers, we can see that the possessive form does not necessarily attach to a noun, but to an entire noun phrase, and thus to whatever comes last in that phrase. Inflections are more restricted. Try to form plural version of the examples above and see how they differ. A bound morpheme that attaches to phrases is called a clitic.

The final set of inflections can be observed on adjectives. Adjectives have comparative and superlative forms. In this case, the morphological forms are actually the exception. The majority of adjectives form the comparative and superlative periphrastically, i.e. syntactically with more and most.

  1. inflection: high — higher — highest
  2. periphrastic: interesting — more interesting — most interesting
  3. supletive: good — better — best

Inflecting adjectives are mostly monosyllabic, or bisyllabic ending in -y. Shorter words tend to be more frequent, and frequency is an important factor when it comes to retaining inflectional forms as we will explore on verbs in the next section.