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Levels of Linguistic Analysis II: Morphology

8 Inflection

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.

8.2 Irregular verbs

To a learner of English it might seem unpredictable which verbs are regular and which are irregular. However, there is a strong statistical pattern connecting regularity to frequency.

First, let’s quickly confirm that the regular forms on -ed are indeed more common. 7

BNC-BABY
ed=[word = ".+ed" & pos = "V.D"]
non_ed=[word != ".+ed" & pos = "V.D"]
count ed by word %c
count non_ed by word %c

The pos tag for past tense forms of verbs always begins with a V and ends in a D. The . matches anything. The regular expressions ".+ed" matches everything ending in ed. With ! we look for everything that does not match. The count command provides frequency lists. However, we need to know how many different verbs, i.e. different types there are. We don’t need to manually count and scroll down forever, we can have an external program do that.

count ed by word %c > "| wc -l"
> 3072
count non_ed by word %c > "| wc -l"
> 224

> "| ..." directs the output of count into the program wc a.k.a. word count which can also count lines with the -l option.

We can see that the type frequency, i.e. the amount of distinct verbs, is much lower for the irregular form than for the regular one. This is a different type of “commonness” than the one we have dealt with so far when we looked at token frequencies of individual structures.

Taken individually, the irregular verbs are actually rather frequent. Let’s have a look at the 25 most frequent verbs in the BNC-BABY.

BNC-BABY
[pos = "VV.*"]
count by hw

I am filtering modal verbs and the highly frequent and highly irregular verbs be, have, and do by restricting the search to tags that begin with VV, see CLAWS tagset (. matches any character and * repeats the preceding character any amount of times). The count command gives us a frequency list ordered descending by the most frequent hw, which is BNC-speak for lemma. Take a look at the output of the commands and consider how many of the verb types are irregular verbs. At the top of the frequency list, most verbs are irregular, and the lower you go, the rarer they become.

It is not a coincidence that the most frequent verbs are the most irregular ones. In fact, the rarer the verb the more likely it is to be regularized. If an irregular forms is used a lot, it survives longer while rare forms get forgotten, in which case the regular form is used in analogy to other regular verbs. The default, so to speak.

For more examples, and further explanation, watch the following video: How words get forgotted

8.3 Homework

We have looked at frequency patterns of irregular past tense forms. Construct an argument concerning whether the same pattern can be observed for plural forms of nouns. Gather data! Remember exploratory research. Gather as many categories as you might find important in the selection of plural forms and support them with some preliminary data (frequencies, examples). Use the tools at your disposal, including demonstrations in this section and the cheatsheet in the Links section.

Bonus task: visualize the data. As soon as you have some numbers in a spreadsheet (e.g. Excel). Don’t be scared, it isn’t too hard to figure out how to create some nice bar charts. :)

We will discuss your results in class.

8.4 Tip of the day

When you write homework, essays, term papers, or even presentations, keep writing and formatting separated. Pick a pre-made or make your own document template, and stick to it. Don’t customize, don’t build from scratch. Keep your formatting at a bare minimum while you are focusing on carrying out the task. That doesn’t mean format badly! Rather, take your time to find or create a template at a different time. This way you can eliminate the one of the biggest form of distraction.

In academic writing across disciplines, all the different style guides you have to deal with might be overwhelming and confusing. But in the end, it can all be boiled down to just three key elements: text, data, and reference 8. Only the first two need to be taken care of manually during the writing process.

Text should be arranged in coherent paragraphs. Section headlines should have some specific formatting so they can be used as key for a table of contents or cross-referencing. Your type setting tool of choice (Word for most) has a way to deal with this—learn it! Anything else should be taken care of by your template.

When it comes to presenting data, here are the only three elements you should bother with manually.

  • Meta-linguistic reference: words and phrases as in-text examples in italics
  • Listed examples: indented and in their own paragraph, consecutively numbered
  • Tables and figures: keep it simple here, too. They need to have title, numbering and description. Don’t bother applying unnecessary visual effects, or having the text flow nicely around them. If the table or figure doesn’t fit, it belongs in the appendix. Most of those conventions you can see in action on this blog and in every reading.

In a well written text, you don’t need any other visual emphasis, except maybe to highlight parts of listed examples in bold. Italics, underlined or colored text is otherwise unnecessary and unconventional. There are also long quotes, book or journal titles, footnotes, and listings; however, it’s worth considering whether you actually need them. In most cases, you are better off skipping those.

Then, there are tables of content, citations and bibliographies, cross-references, lists of tables/abbreviations etc.; but here is a simple rule I learned the hard way: Never create these manually—never! There are ways to deal with citations and bibliographies automatically that allow you to apply whatever style your instructor or potential publisher requires. There is also a technological counter-part to the idea of keeping formatting and writing separate (Latex, Markdown). I will return to this in a future Tiwilbemba.

In summary, keep things simple, be aware of the elements in your text, and don’t mix. Extensive formatting can be a huge time sink and should be avoided.