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LECTURE: SCHEMAS - INFLECTION
John D. Alderete, Linguistics 323, Simon Fraser University
Goals: this lecture is an introduction to inflectional morphology, providing a number of
concepts and terms for describing this type of morphology, how paradigms are
constructed in tables and rows, and the categories of the most common inflectional
dimensions (number, gender, case, tense, aspect, modality). It will provide some of the
necessary empirical foundations for motivating word schemas.
Keywords: inflectional category, inflectional dimension, paradigm construction, number,
gender, case, tense, aspect, mood, voice markings, dependent verbs
Reading: Understanding Morphology 5.1
TALKING ABOUT INFLECTIONS
Definitions
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inflectional category, a morphological distinction made to mark a grammatical
function (see prior lecture), e.g., singular, masculine
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inflectional dimension, a classification system for a set of inflectional categories,
e.g., number, gender, case, tense, aspect, modality
Example: /-s/ marks the inflectional categories ‘third person, singular, present tense’ in
He walk-s.
Dimensions:
Categories:
Example: walk-er is the derived noun, formed by adding the derivational suffix /-er/.
CONSTRUCTING PARADIGMS
Assumption: inflectional paradigms represent dimensions as columns or rows, hence
usually two dimensional (though more dimensions possible with more tables)
Task: produce a three-dimensional paradigm for the verb be based on tense (present,
past), person (1 2 3), and number (sg, pl); use the two-table format employed in the book
Conventions:
subscript notation
feature value notation
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INFLECTIONAL DIMENSIONS FOR NOUNS
Definitions:
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number, marks that indicate the quanitities of entities referred to by a NP
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gender (morphological), marks that are arbitrary, but relate to the natural sex of an
NP, e.g., Old English wīf (neuter), la lune ‘moon’ (feminine)
case, marks that indicate how an NP is used in a sentence (syntactic sense of
‘grammatical function’)
Illustration: Old English personal pronouns
Dimensions:
Categories:
Case distinctions:
Illustration: Modern English personal pronouns
Question: which of the inflectional dimensions were still retained in present day English?
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Question: which of the inflectional categories were retained in pronouns? Elsewhere?
INFLECTIONAL DIMENSIONS FOR VERBS
Definitions:
•
deixis (meta-term), system of orienting and identifying participants in discourse
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number, marks quantities expressed by logical subjects (rarely objects) of a sentence
person, deictic inflectional dimension that orients the speaker relative to the addressee
and other participants not addressed
tense, deictic inflectional dimension that relates the speaker’s time of utterance to the
time of the content of the utterance
aspect, verbal aspectual dimension that describes the internal temporal structure of an
event or state
modality (cf. mood), deictic inflectional dimension that relates the proposition
expressed by the utterance to the speaker’s attitude or mental state
dependent verbs (also: nonfinite verbs), verbs that are subordinate to a ‘main verb’,
and have a host of language particular syntactic properties
Illustration: two major verb classes in Modern English
Finite
Non-finite (=dependent)
Present: write, write-s
Infinitive: (to) write
Past: wrote
Present participle: writ-ing
Past participle: writt-en
Gerund: writ-ing
Question: what are the major differences between finite and non-finite verbs?
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Finite verbs: can be tensed/show tense distinction, may occur in isolation
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Nonfinite ‘dependent’ verbs: contextually dependent, tense determined by
context
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Illustration: tense/aspect distinctions in write
Present: I write
Present progressive: I am writing
Present perfect: I have written
Present perfect progressive:
I have been writing
Past: I wrote
Past progressive: I was writing
Past perfect: I had written
Past perfect progressive:
I had been writing
Future: I will write
Future progressive: I will be writing
Future perfect: I will have written
Future perfect progressive: I will have been writing
Questions: what tense inflectional categories are expressed? Which categories are
expressed by means of a morphological process, and which are expressed by a modal?
Question: which aspectual categories are expressed, and how are they formalized?
Question: what modalities are expressed in English, and how are they formalized?
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Illustration: verb paradigms in Old English
Question: which forms are finite and which are nonfinite?
Question: what tense categories are expressed in the morphology and how?
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Question: what aspectual categories are expressed in the morphology and how?
Question: what modality categories are expressed in the morphology and how?
Illustration: weak versus strong verbs
Question: how does marking of verbal categories differ in two above classes?
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