In this section you will learn more about what grammatical information inflectional morphemes can express. We will begin with English, but since it has very little inflectional morphology, we will look at other languages too.
The following is a complete list of English inflectional affixes:
- {-s}1 ‘plural’: attaches to singular nouns to form plurals;
- {-s}2 ‘3rd person singular’: attaches to verbs in the present tense if the subject is singular and neither the speaker nor the hearer;
- {-ed} ‘past tense’: attaches to verbs to signal that the state or event referred to happened in the past;
- {-en} ‘past participle’: attaches to some verbs to form the past participle (an adjective-like form that is used in the passive and some tense-aspect combinations); note that most verbs do not distinguish between the past tense and the past perfect form;
- {-ing} ‘imperfective aspect’: attaches to verbs in the context of imperfect aspect (“continuous tenses”);
- {-er} ‘comparative’: attaches to one- and two-syllable adjectives to signal that the property referred to is present to a higher degree than expected;
- {-est} ‘superlative’: attaches to one- and two-syllable adjectives to signal that the property referred to is present to the highest possible extent.
That’s all! But if we look at other languages, we find more types of inflectional morphology. The following are some typical uses.
Case
Case refers to marking on nouns that reflects their grammatical role in the sentence. Most case systems have ways to distinguish the subject from the object of a sentence, as well as special marking for possessors and indirect objects. With four cases (nominative, genitive, dative and accusative), German is a good example of such a language:
Der Vater putz‐t sein‐er Tochter die Schuh-e
the.MASC.SG.NOM father.MASC.SG.NOM brush‐PRES.3SG his‐FEM.SG.DAT daughter-FEM.SG.DAT the.PL.ACC shoe.MASC‐PL.ACC
‘The father polishes the shoes for his daughter.’
Some languages have many more case distinctions than this. Estonian and Finnish are known for having especially many cases (14 in Estonian and 15 in Finnish): the Wikipedia article on Finnish cases is a good source if you’d like to learn more. At first sight these languages appear to be more complex than languages with a low number of cases or no case system at all. However, this ignores the fact that these languages often have a complex system of prepositions. The complexity therefore only shifts from one area to another.
Gender
In English we mark gender on third person pronouns, and there are also non-productive and non-obligatory gender suffixes for nouns, like –ess in actress. By contrast, gender in a language like French is best treated as inflectional. Not only do all nouns have a semantically arbitrary gender, but determiners and adjectives (and sometimes verbs) also show agreement with the grammatical gender of the noun they’re associated with to. For example, the noun corbeau ‘crow’ in French is masculine (abbreviated M), and so it appears with a masculine determiner and adjective; the noun chouette ‘owl’ is feminine (abbreviated F), so it appears with a feminine determiner and adjective. This is independent of the actual sex of a crow or owl.
le petit corbeau
the.M small.M crow(M)
‘the small crow’
la petite chouette
the.F small.F owl(F)
‘the small owl’
Number
Most languages, if they have grammatical number, just distinguish singular (‘one’) vs. plural (‘more than one’), but number systems can be more complex as well. For example, many languages have dual in addition to singular and plural. Dual number is used for groups of exactly two things; we have a tiny bit of dual in English with determiners like both, which means ‘strictly two’. You have to replace both with all if a group has three or more things in it. But in English we don’t have any morphological marking of dual (at least not any more — Old English had a dual).
An example of a language that distinguishes dual morphologically is Sorbian (a Slavic language spoken on the Eastern border of Germany; these examples are from Lower Sorbian, one of two standardized varieties of the language).
Wuknik rej-uj-e
student dance-PRES
‘the student is dancing’
Dwa wuknik-a rej-uj-otej
two student-DUAL dance-PRES-DUAL
’(the) two students are dancing’
Tśi wuknik-i rej-uj-u
three student-PLURAL dance-PRES-PLURAL
‘(the) three students are dancing’
A small number of languages go further and also have a trial (pronounced [tri.əl]), usually only on pronouns. This is used for groups of exactly three. A language can also have paucal number, used for small groups. Other number distinctions are possible, but these are some of the common ones.
Mood
Some languages have inflectional morphemes to express the mood of the verb. One example is Spanish, where the subjunctive mood is used to refer to non-actual states or events:
Si no hubiera sido por Anita, mi reloj ser-ia perdido.
if NEG have.SUBJ been for Anita my watch be-SUBJUNCTIVE lost
‘If it had not been for Anita, my watch would be lost.’
Evidentiality
Many languages use morphology to indicate a speaker’s certainty about what they’re saying, or the source of their evidence for what they say. This is called evidential marking. In Japanese, for example, it is necessary to indicate whether a sensation is experienced subjectively, as in the first example or whether it is objectively observable as in the second example:
atama ga ita-i
head NOM ache-PS
‘my head hurts’
John wa atama ga ita-sō da
John TOP head NOM ache-EVD2 COP.PS
‘John seems to have a headache’
CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0, Adapted from Anderson, Catherine, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi, Essentials of Linguistics. 2nd ed. by Arne Werfel.