Inflectional categories

While most languages have morphological inflection of some sort, the actual inflectional categories can differ quite widely across languages. We will briefly survey both the most common categories and some of the ways languages may differ. It is convenient to make a first broad cut into nominal and verbal categories, though the nominal categories often appear on adjectives and verbs through concord. The most common nominal categories are number (Corbett 2000), gender (Corbett 1991), and case (Blake 2001).

Though some languages do not inflect for number, many languages make an obligatory inflectional distinction between singular and plural number of nouns and pronouns, which spills over to verbs and adjectives through concord. Less common, but not unusual, is dual number, which distinguishes nouns referring to two items from those referring either to one or to more than two. Dual inflection is never found in the absence of singular and plural, and when a language has the category dual, it changes the meaning of the plural from ‘more than one’ to ‘more than two’. We see a similar effect in English, where the dual quantifier both causes the plural quantifier all to mean ‘more than two’. A person who has two children must say both my children, not all my children. There are even languages with trial number, marking nouns that refer to sets of three, or paucal number (from Latin pauca ‘few’).

Gender is less common than number and more varied. Because of the connection of the English word gender to biological sex and because genders in European languages are sex-based, we tend to think that linguistic genders are always sex-based. For example, the Romance languages (e.g., French, Portuguese, and Spanish) have two genders, masculine and feminine, corresponding very roughly to male and female, at least insofar as nouns that refer to male persons are almost invariably masculine and those referring to females feminine. But just as common among the world’s languages are genders based on animacy, shape, or other natural properties. Languages of North America, when they exhibit gender, most commonly have the two genders animate and inanimate, while the large Niger-Congo family of Africa has genders based on shape as well. Languages also vary greatly in the number of genders they have, ranging from the minimal two up to more than a dozen in some languages of Papua New Guinea. And though genders are always semantic in origin, most languages with obligatory gender have nouns whose gender assignment is arbitrary, a well-worn example being the German word for ‘girl’, Mädchen, which is neuter in gender. In languages like French or Spanish, with only masculine and feminine genders, objects must also have genders, which results in the French word fourchette ‘fork’ being feminine, but couteau ‘knife’ masculine. In this particular case, it is possible to predict these gender assignments on purely morphological grounds, but certainly not semantics, unless one has a very good imagination.

The case of a nominal expression is determined by its syntactic function. The simplest cases are nominative and accusative, usually reserved for syntactic subjects and objects respectively (the peculiar names of these and other cases are Latin translations of terms from the Greek grammarians).¹ Some languages have a case used only for the subjects of transitive sentences, the ergative, with an absolutive case reserved for both objects of transitives and subjects of intransitives. The genitive and dative (also Latin terms) are used for possessors and indirect objects. Other cases are more directly semantic and might include such notions as locative (denoting a place) or instrumental. Just as with gender, languages differ widely in the number of cases they encode in their morphology. Most languages do not show case inflection at all, by which we mean that nominals do not differ in their form depending on their syntactic function (some languages – Japanese is an example – have case markers, but they are independent words and not inflectional affixes). Languages that have only a small number of cases tend to stick to the central syntactic categories of nominative and accusative (or ergative and absolutive), along with genitive and perhaps dative. The ancient Semitic languages, for example, had only the basic three nominative, accusative, and genitive.

The last nominal inflectional category that we will discuss is person. Universally, there are only three persons, and all spoken languages have all three. Nouns are always third person, and first and second person forms are always pronouns. The major differences among languages are in the plural, especially the first-person plural. Here a language may distinguish between a form meaning ‘me and others, but not you’, which we call an exclusive form, and an inclusive form, meaning ‘me and others, including you’. As an inflectional category, person, like gender, is often most prominently displayed through agreement, specifically agreement of verbs with their subject or object, and some languages have quite elaborate systems of person marking on the verb.

Verbal inflection expresses a number of types of morphosyntactic categories related to events, which vary quite widely across languages. These include tense (Comrie 1985), aspect (Comrie 1976), mood (Palmer 2001), and voice. A language may express some of these categories other than by verb inflection. English, for example, has an elaborate system for expressing aspect, mood, and voice, but the only category marked directly on the verb is tense, which can be either present or past: departs vs. departed. (In truth, the so-called English present tense is better thought of as non-past, as seen in expressions like the train departs tomorrow at nine.) The others are expressed by a fairly elaborate system of auxiliary or helping verbs, resulting in such long expressions as should have been being considered. Tense is directly connected to time, and languages often express three tenses morphologically: past, present, and future. Other tenses are sometimes found, such as remote past. Aspect has more to do with the way in which we view the unfolding of an event than with its simple position in time. For example, many languages distinguish imperfective from perfective aspect, where the first denotes an action in progress while the second denotes a completed action. For example, the Russian imperfect verb lechit ‘treat’ is imperfective, while its perfective counterpart is vylechit ‘cure’. Mood reflects a speaker’s commitment to a proposition. English modal auxiliary verbs include may and must, which express different degrees of commitment to obligation or truth, as in the following two series, the first having to do with obligation, the second truth: you may leave vs. you must leave; or she may have seen him vs. she must have seen him. Voice has to do with the role of the subject as either agent or patient. The most common distinction is between the active and passive voices, where the subject of the latter is the patient, as opposed to the (unmarked) active. Again, English has a distinction between active and passive that is expressed through auxiliary verbs. In Latin, the same distinction is expressed through inflection directly on the verb: amō ‘I love’ vs. amor ‘I am loved’.

¹ The Latin term accusativus is a mistranslation of the Greek term aitiatike ‘causal’. The Greek word aitia means both ‘cause’ and ‘accusation’ and the Latin grammarians simply translated the wrong sense.

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مواضيع ذات صلة

Inflection Summary

Typology

Syncretism

Suppletion

Reduplication

Root-and-pattern morphology

Apophony

Affixation and stem alternations

Inventory of Inflectional Morphology Types

The formal similarity between inflection and derivation

Differences between inflection and derivation

Inflection vs. Derivation