3.6 Inflectional morphemes

Inflectional morphemes are suffixes attached to nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs to add grammatical information to the base words. They do not change the meaning or POS of the original word. There are eight inflectional morphemes in English.

Notes: Only regular nouns are pluralized by adding the inflectional morpheme -s, -es, or -ies. Irregular nouns do not follow this rule (e.g., deer-deer, mouse-mice, ox-oxen, child-children, tooth-teeth, goose-geese, leaf-leaves)

The situation is similar for irregular verbs. The past tense of regular verbs is formed by adding the inflectional morpheme -ed. However, irregular verbs are erratic (e.g., speak-spoke, take-took, bear-bore, fall-fell, bring-brought, draw-drew, drink-drank, fly-flew).

The English language is highly idiosyncratic due to the many irregularities in spelling, pronunciation, and grammar. Nobody summarizes the irregularities of English better than Richard Lederer > Quotes > Quotable Quote > “Let’s face it - English is a crazy language.

Watch this video from Prof. Birte Bos and Prof. Handke to learn more about the two morphological operations: derivation and inflection.