Question

What is a key distinction between inflectional and derivational morphemes in English?

• A. Inflectional morphemes change the core meaning of a word, while derivational morphemes do not.
• B. Derivational morphemes often change a word's part of speech, whereas inflectional morphemes generally do not.
• C. Inflectional morphemes are always suffixes, while derivational morphemes can be prefixes or suffixes.
• D. Derivational morphemes are more productive (applicable to more words) than inflectional morphemes.

Answer 1

Answer:

B. Derivational morphemes often change a word's part of speech, whereas inflectional morphemes generally do not.

Understanding Morphemes: Inflectional vs. Derivational

• A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a language. It cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. Words are made up of one or more morphemes.

Derivational Morphemes

• Definition: Derivational morphemes are prefixes or suffixes that, when added to a base word, can create new words, often changing the word's lexical category (part of speech) and/or its core meaning.
• Key Characteristic: They frequently alter the part of speech of the base word. For example:
  • Adding '-ness' to the adjective 'happy' creates the noun 'happiness'. (Adjective → Noun)
  • Adding '-ly' to the adjective 'quick' creates the adverb 'quickly'. (Adjective → Adverb)
  • Adding 'un-' to the adjective 'happy' creates 'unhappy', changing its meaning. (Adjective → Adjective, but with opposite meaning)
• Meaning Change: They significantly change the semantic meaning of the word.
• Productivity: Some derivational morphemes are highly productive (e.g., '-able', '-er'), while others are less so.

Inflectional Morphemes

• Definition: Inflectional morphemes are suffixes that are added to words to indicate grammatical functions such as tense, number, possession, or comparison, without changing the word's part of speech or its fundamental meaning.
• Key Characteristic: They do not change the part of speech of the base word. They merely adjust the word to fit the grammatical context.
• Limited Number: English has a small, finite set of only eight inflectional morphemes. These are all suffixes:
  • Noun Inflections:
    -s (plural): cats
    -'s (possessive): cat's
  • Verb Inflections:
    -s (3rd person singular present): walks
    -ed (past tense): walked
    -ing (present participle): walking
    -en or -ed (past participle): eaten, walked
  • Adjective/Adverb Inflections:
    -er (comparative): faster
    -est (superlative): fastest
• Meaning Change: They do not change the core lexical meaning of the word; they only add grammatical information. For instance, 'cat' and 'cats' refer to the same animal, differing only in number.

Primary Distinction for Competitive Exams

• The crucial difference is that derivational morphemes can change a word's part of speech and often its core meaning, creating new words, while inflectional morphemes primarily indicate grammatical relations without altering the part of speech or fundamental meaning.
• This distinction is fundamental in morphology and is often tested in verbal ability sections of competitive exams to assess understanding of word formation and grammatical structure.