I am writing a paper on inflectional morphemes in English. The literature reviewed so far listed six inflectional morphemes in English which exclude 'y'. Two criteria were used in selecting the inflectional morphemes: a. It should be a suffix b. when added to a free morpheme changes the word class and in the case of verbs it sometimes changes the tense. Looking at this paradigm of words. Shall we not describe the 'y' added to them as the 'seventh' inflectional morpheme in English.( lad =lady; air =airy; man = many; hand = handy; arm = army; fuss = fussy; glutton = gluttony; fuzz = fuzzy; luck = lucky etc. Some many have read something on this already. I want experts' view on this.
I don't know of any scholarly papers on this topic. What I do know is that your list contains two different types of pairs. One of them is a group where a noun is converted into an adjective by adding the productive suffix -y you're interested in. The other group consists of pairs that are historically unrelated and do not instantiate this rule: lad (from Old Norse) has nothing to do with lady (from Old English hlaf-dige 'who kneads bread'), and both are nouns;
man - many are also unrelated, as is seen from the difference in pronunciation; army is a borrowing from French, and both arm and army are nouns. the -y-suffix in army and in gluttony is from French -é, whereas the -y-suffix to derive adjectives is from Germanic -ig. Of course, from a synchronic point of view, the two may be confused or perceived as a single suffix, but only the adjectival -y-suffix, I think, is productive.
'Nough said. Besides, counting needs criteria too. Six, you say? Does s count as 1, two -PL and POSS- or three, -s, 's and s'? Similarly for verbs, does -en count once, or twice for PAST and PPART? Besides, some N and ADJ are the same word, such as "melancholy", where -y is no inflectional morpheme.
Dear Dennis,
As Peter says, in your list is a mix of different things. One thing is inflectional morphology and quite another is the derivational morphology. In the latter, which we obtained by adding the suffix, is a new word with a different meaning (which is the case in several of your examples). However, when you work with inflectional morpheme, adding the suffix, what we do is change the grammatical function that word plays in the sentence, but do not change the word. I must admit that it is not always easy to distinguish. I suggest you consult: Balthasar Bickel and Johanna Nichols, "Inflectional Morphology." Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, 2nd ed, edited by Timothy Chopin.. Cambridge University Press, 2007
Regards.
Dear Dennis,
Indeed, as previous commenters have said, your list is a mix of different types of pairs, and there is a difference between inflectional and derivational affixes to observe. The book I use for teaching word formation is Jackson, H. and ze Amvela, E. 2007. Words, Meaning and Vocabulary. An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology. London: Continuum, which I recommend you consult.
Peter and Dante pointed out the two categories involved in the examples listed. Another Peter wants the criteria for defining inflectional morphemes to be made explicit and Jacob points to a source of information on morphemes. Great work! These views will be considered in the write-up. I am grateful.
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