Inflectional Morphemes

Morphology is similar to organic chemistry. Much like an organic chemist might study the structure of organic compounds, a linguist can look at a word and break it into meaningful pieces (called morphemes) to learn about its structure and how it changes under different circumstances. Inflectional morphemes are a particularly insightful piece of the puzzle, as they communicate grammatical properties such as tense, comparison, number, and more. The list of inflectional morphemes isn’t long; there are only eight inflectional morphemes in the English language, but they are among the most common sounds in our language.

Inflectional Morphemes Definition

Inflectional morphemes are defined as units of meaning that are added to the base or root of a word to indicate grammatical information but do not change the word's basic meaning or its part of speech. In English, there are eight inflectional morphemes which can indicate aspects such as tense, number, possession, or comparison. For example, adding "-s" to the end of a noun to indicate plurality (so "cat" becomes "cats") is an instance of using an inflectional morpheme.

Inflectional morphemes have meaning of their own, but they don’t significantly alter the meaning of the base word to which they’re attached. A base word and an inflectional morpheme work together to enhance the meaning of a word in some way.

For example, the base word bake in baking still communicates the idea of cooking with flour and eggs using an oven. The suffix -ing simply adjusts the tense to express when it happens.

Fig. 1 - "He bakes... they're baking... I baked." Regardless of the tense, the word bake retains its meaning.

Inflectional morphemes are suffixes, which is a type of affix. An affix is a group of letters attached to either the beginning (prefix) or end (suffix) of a base word. Here are a few suffixes that are inflectional morphemes:

The significance of the cluster of letters is why they’re categorized as morphemes. Each carries its own meaning, which can alter a grammatical aspect of the sentence (such as showing tense or plurality).

Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphemes

The difference between inflectional and derivational morphemes is pretty simple: derivational morphemes can create new words when added to a base word, but inflectional morphemes cannot.

Derivational morphemes derive new words by adding an affix—much like an inflectional morpheme—but they are capable of changing the base word’s grammatical category, which inflectional morphemes cannot do.

Fig. 2 - "Carmelize the apples and top with your decorative, flourless pie crust." This sentence depends on derivational morphemes.

When a derivational morpheme is added to a base word, that word might (not in every case) take a new meaning entirely. While these words are certainly related in essence, the word class has changed and thus altered the way the word functions.

When an inflectional morpheme is added to a base word, the base simply becomes inflected. This means that the word changes forms to reflect its grammatical surroundings.

Complete List of Inflectional Morphemes Examples

There are eight inflectional morphemes in English, each serving a different grammatical function. Here are some examples:

You’ll notice that each example of an inflectional morpheme is a suffix, which means it has been added to the end of the base word.

Types of Inflectional Morphemes

If you want to think of different types of inflectional morphemes, you might consider the various ways they impact the base word.

Tense

For many verbs in the English language, past tense is denoted with a -ed (looked, climbed, painted) so -ed is an inflectional morpheme. In some irregular cases, though, the past tense of a verb is expressed with a change in vowel.

In either case, a tense change is a type of inflection, so inflectional morphemes are necessary to communicate the change.

Verb Agreement

Verb agreement is the grammatical rule that a subject must “agree” with the number and person of the subject. The verb will take a particular inflectional morpheme to show agreement.

If you look at Spanish, you’ll see inflectional morphemes at the end of verbs that agree with the number and person of the subject of the verb.

Number

English communicates the number of a noun by adding -s or -es to the end of the noun.

Due to some oddities of the English language, some inflectional morphemes have several different pronunciations. One example of this is the sound to indicate plurality, the inflectional morpheme -s. Notice the difference between the -s sound when you say cats and dogs; in the first instance, the sound is /s/, but in the second, it’s /z/. This is due to the difference in consonant sounds that precede the -s.

More Inflectional Morphemes Examples

There are a number of examples of inflectional morphemes, but compared to other languages, inflectional morphology is relatively limited in English. Some languages have case morphology, which is absent in English.

Case morphology is used in languages such as German. For example, take a look at the sentences below:

In the first sentence, the boy is doing the seeing, and the phrase “the boy” is formed “der Junge.” In the second sentence, Lyla is doing the seeing. What does she see? The boy. In the instance where the boy is seen, the phrase “the boy” is changed to “den Jungen”, which has a different morpheme to represent the boy’s different role in the sentence. This is something that does not occur in English! For example, in both sentences, "the boy" would stay the same no matter what his role is.