Inflection in lexical morphology

Inflection in lexical morphology

In grammar, inflection is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case. The inflection of verbs is also called conjugation, and the inflection of nouns, adjectives and pronouns is also called declension.

An inflection expresses one or more grammatical categories with a prefix, suffix or infix, or another internal modification such as a vowel change. For example, the Latin verb ducam, meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix -am, expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense (future). The use of this suffix is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word lead is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense; it is simply the bare form of a verb.

Most stratum1 inflectional morphology consists of either; erratic morphemes whose behavior is like unpredictable; or inflectional processes that were once full of vitality but have long since atrophied; or borrowed affixes which came in with few words borrowed from foreign languages and a largely restricted to those loanwords. We will consider examples of frozen historical relics first. We will see that much of the irregular inflection is a remnant of patterns that obtained (sometimes quite regularly) at an earlier historical period. We will illustrate this first with ablaut and then umlaut.

Ablaut

The term ablaut refers to the change in a root vowel, which indicates a change in grammatical function. Thus, [ai] may alternate with [eu] to mark a change from present tense to past tense as in ride [raid] (present tense) ~ rode [reud] (past tense).

Present simple Past simple

Drive /draiv/; drove /dreuv/

write /rait/ wrote /reut/

Rise /raiz/ rose /reuz/

Strive /straiv/ strove /streuv/

Dive /daiv/ dove /deuv/

American pronunciation

At strata one any verb belonging to this class undergoes the vowel mutation were by /ai/ changes to /eu/ in the past tense.

According to Katamba 2006 ablaut is not any more productive, although it remnants of it affect a sizable number of words in present day English. Most of the words affected belong to the category of so – called strong verbs. These can still being seen in their reflexes in modern English:

Present tense past tense past participle

Class 1 rise rose risen

Class 2 freeze froze frozen

Class 3 shrink shrank shrunk

Class 4 bear bore born

Class 5 give gave given

Class 6 know knew known

Class 7 stand stood stood

This is important to know the class that a verb belongs to, because knowing it, is easy to predict how it is going to affected by ablaut in the past tense and past participle.

Umlaut

Umlaut is a German term which changed sound or sound shift, as it is composed of un-”around-changed, and laut “sound”

Katamba (2006:102) defines it as the fronting of a vowel when the next syllable contains a front vowel. Thus originally phonologically conditioned; whereas ablaut was from the start a purely morphologically triggered root vowel at alternation.

Prior to AD