Regular and irregular inflectional morphology
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Here are some ways English inflectional morphology is irregular:
| Type of irregularity | Noun plurals | Verbs: past tense | Verbs: past participle |
| Unusual suffix | oxen, syllabi, antennae | , | taken, seen, fallen, eaten |
| Change of stem vowel | foot/feet, mouse/mice | run/ran, come/came, flee/fled, meet/met, fly/flew, stick/stuck, get/got, break/broke | swim/swum, sing/sung |
| Change of stem vowel with unusual suffix | brother/brethren/ | feel/felt, kneel/knelt | write/written, do/done, break/broken, fly/flown |
| Change in base/stem form (sometimes with unusual suffix) | , | send/sent, bend/bent, think/thought, teach/taught, buy/bought | send/sent, bend/bent, think/thought, teach/taught, buy/bought |
| Zero-marking (no suffix, no stem change) | deer, sheep, moose, fish | hit, beat | hit, beat, come |
Suppletion (instead of a suffix, the whole word changes):
be - am - are - is - was - were - been
go - went - gone
good - better - best
bad - worse - worst
some - more - most
Future of verbs: will go, will eat, will fight, etc.
Comparative/superlative of adjectives: more intelligent, more expensive, etc.; most intelligent, most expensive, etc.
Labels: Morphology
