580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
Figure 2 – uploaded by Dr. Manoj K U M A R Yadav
Table 2 We come across some basic problems in the morphological description. In the chart giver above, some major problems in the analysis of English morphology have been overlooked. In the above example, we have only considered English words in which different morphemes are easily identified as separate elements. Thus, the inflectional morpheme-s is added teacher, and we get the plural teachers. But what is the inflectional morpheme which makes sheep the plural of sheep, or women the plural of woman? Similarly, a related question concerns. The inflectior makes chose the past tense of choose. Nevertheless, another question concerns the derivation of an adjective like /egal. Suppose, in case, -al is the derivational affix, as it is in the forms like it < continental, what will be the stamp? No, indeed it will not be /eg. n singular or plural form, whether a verb is in the present or past tense or whether it is a >omparative or possessive form of an adjective. For example, the plural of the noun boy would ye -S (boys),the past tense of the verb play will be —ed (played), the comparative of the adjective pig, Will be —er (bigger) and so on. It may also be noted that in the English language, all nflectional morphemes are suffixes. We can easily commit to memory the different classes or sategories of morphemes with the help of the following diagram: These problems, and many more which crop up in the analysis of a language, have not been fully resolved by linguists. The solutions to these problems are clever in some cases than in others. For instance, the relationship between Jaw and legal reflects the historical influence of other languages in English word-forms. The modern form of Jaw is the result of borrowing into Old English from Old Norse, over more than a thousand years ago. The modern form of legal is a borrowing from the Latin form legalise, which means, of the law. Thus, it can be said that a reasonably large number of English forms owe their morphological patterning to other languages like Latin and Greek.
Related Figures (6)
