Report on `Inflection: forms', Andrea Paulsen, 25 April 1996

Andrea Paulsen made the following points in her report (includes revisions and comments by DG):

1. Inflection is a part of morphology.
2. Morphology deals with the internal grammatical structure of words.
3. What is a word? The term `word' can be defined in very different ways:
   • The smallest meaningful part of language. But this definition applies to parts of simple words, morphemes: sing, sings, singing, ...
   • Word forms (orthographic and phonological shapes).
   • Items of vocabulary (lexemes). [But what about (a) ad hoc words, (b) idioms? - DG]
   • Inflected forms.
   • ... [Note that there are other definitions of word, based on syntactic distribution, internal structure, semantics, further details of orthography and phonology. DG]

4. Syntax [Phrasal syntax. DG] describes how one word is bound to another.
5. Syntax and inflexion determine grammaticality of sentences. [How? Note congruence relations. - DG]
6. Inflection specifies which morphemes combine in what way to form simplex words; inflectional forms are handled by rules operating on morphemes (smallest meaningful segments of words). [Difference between morpheme and morph? - DG]
7. The grammatical categories which are marked by inflection forms in English are
   • Case
   • Gender
   • Number
   • Tense
   • Person
8. Affixes are generally positioned at the edges of words, either the beginning (prefixes) or the end (suffixes); English only has inflectional suffixes. [How does German differ here? - DG]

Literature:

Lyons, John (1992). Language and Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992, p. 100-104.