Question

Which statement accurately describes inflectional morphemes in English?

• A. They always change the word's grammatical category.
• B. They are used to form new words with different core meanings.
• C. They typically indicate grammatical relations without changing a word's fundamental class.
• D. They can function as independent words in a sentence.

Answer 1

Answer:

C. They typically indicate grammatical relations without changing a word's fundamental class.

Understanding Inflectional Morphemes in English

• A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a language. It cannot be further divided without losing its meaning.
• Morphemes can be categorized into two main types:
  • Free Morphemes: Can stand alone as words (e.g., 'cat', 'run', 'happy').
  • Bound Morphemes: Cannot stand alone and must be attached to other morphemes (e.g., prefixes like 'un-', suffixes like '-ness', '-s').
• Bound morphemes are further divided into two types:
  • Derivational Morphemes: Change the lexical category (part of speech) of a word or its core meaning. For example, adding '-ness' to the adjective 'happy' creates the noun 'happiness'. Adding 'un-' to 'happy' creates 'unhappy', changing the meaning.
  • Inflectional Morphemes: Indicate grammatical functions or relations without changing the word's fundamental lexical category (part of speech) or its core meaning. They add grammatical information to a word.
• English has a limited and closed set of eight inflectional morphemes, which is a key fact for competitive exams:
  1. -s (plural for nouns): 'cat' → 'cats'
  2. -'s (possessive for nouns): 'John' → 'John's'
  3. -s (third person singular present tense for verbs): 'run' → 'runs'
  4. -ed (past tense for verbs): 'walk' → 'walked'
  5. -en or -ed (past participle for verbs): 'eat' → 'eaten', 'walk' → 'walked'
  6. -ing (present participle/gerund for verbs): 'run' → 'running'
  7. -er (comparative for adjectives/adverbs): 'fast' → 'faster'
  8. -est (superlative for adjectives/adverbs): 'fast' → 'fastest'
• Notice that the word class remains the same with inflectional morphemes: 'cat' (noun) → 'cats' (noun); 'walk' (verb) → 'walked' (verb); 'fast' (adjective) → 'faster' (adjective).
• Inflectional morphemes are always suffixes in English.
• They do not create new words but rather different forms of the same word to fit into grammatical contexts.
• The concept of inflection is crucial in morphology, a branch of linguistics, and frequently tested in verbal ability and grammar sections of competitive exams.