3.1.1 Inflectional Morphology

English has a relatively simple inflectional system; only nouns, verbs, and sometimes adjectives can be inflected, and the number of possible inflectional affixes is quite small.

English nouns have only two kinds of inflection: an affix that marks plural and an affix that marks possessive. For example, many (but not all) English nouns can either appear in the bare stem or singular form, or take a plural suffix. Here are examples of the regular plural suffix -s (also spelled -es), and irregular plurals:

While the regular plural is spelled -s after most nouns, it is spelled -es after words ending in -s (ibis/ibises), -z (waltz/waltzes), -sh (thrush/thrushes), -ch (finch/finches), and sometimes -x (box/boxes). Nouns ending in -y preceded by a consonant change the -y to -i (butterfly/butterflies).

The possessive suffix is realized by apostrophe + -s for regular singular nouns (llama's) and plural nouns not ending in -s (children's) and often by a lone apostrophe after regular plural nouns (llamas') and some names ending in -s or -z (Euripides' comedies).

English verbal infection is more complicated than nominal infection. First, English has three kinds of verbs; main verbs, (eat, sleep, impeach), modal verbs (can, will, should), and primary verbs (be, have, do) (using the terms of Quirk et al., 1985). In this chapter we will mostly be concerned with the main and primary verbs, because it is these that have inflectional endings. Of these verbs a large class are regular, that is to say all verbs of this class have the same endings marking the same functions. These regular verbs (e.g. walk, or inspect) have four morphological forms, as follow:

These verbs are called regular because just by knowing the stem we can predict the other forms by adding one of three predictable endings and making some regular spelling changes (and as we will see in Ch. 7, regular pronunciation changes). These regular verbs and forms are significant in the morphology of English first because they cover a majority of the verbs, and second because the regular class is productive. As discussed earlier, a productive class is one that automatically includes any new words that enter the language. For example the recently-created verb fax (My mom faxed me the note from cousin Everett) takes the regular endings -ed, -ing, -es. (Note that the -s form is spelled faxes rather than faxes; we will discuss spelling rules below).

The irregular verbs are those that have some more or less idiosyncratic forms of inflection. Irregular verbs in English often have five different forms, but can have as many as eight (e.g., the verb be) or as few as three (e.g. cut or hit). While constituting a much smaller class of verbs (Quirk et al. (1985) estimate there are only about 250 irregular verbs, not counting auxiliaries), this class includes most of the very frequent verbs of the language. $ ^{4} $ The table below shows some sample irregular forms. Note that an irregular verb can inflect in the past form (also called the preterite) by changing its vowel (eat/ate), or its vowel and some consonants (catch/caught), or with no change at all (cut/cut).

The way these forms are used in a sentence will be discussed in the syntax and semantics chapters but is worth a brief mention here. The -s form is used in the “habitual present” form to distinguish the third-person singular ending (She jogs every Tuesday) from the other choices of person and number (I/you/we/they/jog every Tuesday). The stem form is used in the infinitive form, and also after certain other verbs (I'd rather walk home, I want to walk home). The -ing participle is used in the progressive construction to mark present or ongoing activity (It is raining), or when the verb is treated as a noun; this particular kind of nominal use of a verb is called a gerund use: Fishing is fine if you live near water. The -ed/-en participle is used in the perfect construction (He's eaten lunch already) or the passive construction (The verdict was overturned yesterday).

In addition to noting which suffixes can be attached to which stems, we need to capture the fact that a number of regular spelling changes occur at these morpheme boundaries. For example, a single consonant letter is doubled before adding the -ing and -ed suffixes (beg/begging/begged). If the final letter is “c”, the doubling is spelled “ck” (picnic/picnicking/picnicked). If the base ends in a silent -e, it is deleted before adding -ing and -ed (merge/merging/merged). Just as for nouns, the -s ending is spelled -es after verb stems ending in -s (toss/tosses), -z, (walt/waltzes) -sh, (wash/washes) -ch, (catch/catches) and sometimes -x (tax/taxes). Also like nouns, verbs ending in -y preceded by a consonant change the -y to -i (try/tries).

The English verbal system is much simpler than for example the European Spanish system, which has as many as fifty distinct verb forms for each regular verb. Fig. 3.1 shows just a few of the examples for the verb amar, 'to love'. Other languages can have even more forms than this Spanish example.