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Give Two Examples Of Inflection In The English Language

Decent Essays

Activity 1 - Mandatory
After reading the suggested sources of information, do the following task.
Answer the following using your own words:
1. What is inflection? How does it work? Give two examples of inflection in the English language. Do not use examples from the materials you read.
It is a word formation process consisting in adding a “bound morpheme” to a word without changing its main meaning.
It takes places because of syntactic needs, to illustrate let us take the following cases:
• Ann worked yesterday.
• Ann works very hard.
In both cases, we can note that there is a syntactic relation between the words of each sentence with the verb “work”, that is why the inflectional morphemes “–ed” and “–s” must be added. In the first example we must attach the inflection (-ed) because of “yesterday”, and in the second because of “Ann” (third person). …show more content…

In spite of the fact that there are only eight inflectional morphemes, this process is very productive since it can be applied to a wide range of words:
• Nouns, to form possessives and plurals (Marco´s books).
• Verbs, to form the present tense of the third person in singular, the progressive tenses, the past tense and the past participle of some verbs (takes, walked, taking, taken).
• Adjectives, to form comparatives and superlatives (quicker, quickest)
2. What is derivation? How does it work? Give two examples of derivation in the English language. Do not use examples from the materials you read.
It is another morphological process consisting in attaching either a prefix or a suffix to a word; yet, this attachment does change the meaning of the original word. In derivation, the relation involved only has effect within the word. For instance

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