Chapter 4: Morphology

 
 
4.7 Summary 
This chapter has introduced you to inflectional morphology and word-formation, including 
derivational morphology. You should now be familiar with different types of morphemes and 
their characteristics, as well as different types of word-formation patterns.
The section on inflectional morphology has shown that languages differ considerably with 
regard to the extent to which they rely on inflectional morphemes to mark grammatical 
categories and relations. Different examples that will help you remember the major types 
were English (increasingly analytic), German (more synthetic than English), Latin (fusional) 
and Turkish (agglutinating). Complexity in the field of inflectional morphology is not only 
caused by the number of inflectional morphemes but also by their variants, the allomorphs. 

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The section on word-formation has demonstrated the need to analyze complexe lexemes 
systematically at the levels of morphological form, morphological structure and semantic 
structure. You have seen that the more regular, morphemic word-formation types of 
compounding, prefixation, suffixation and conversion differ in their effects on the 
grammatical, formal and semantic structures of the elements involved. Essentially, the 
function of compounding is to join words and concepts in order to create more specific words 
and concepts; the main function of prefixation is to modify the meanings of existing words in 
a number of basic ways; the main effect of suffixation and conversion is to change the word-
class of the base. The non-morphemic word-formation patterns (blending, clipping, acronym-
formation and reduplication) are less regular and more creative, sometimes also more playful, 
than the morphemic ones. The idea, hinted at in the final section, that knowledge about word-
formation patterns is available in the form of rough schemas and blueprints rather than strict 
rules seems particularly plausible for these flexible formation types but is also applicable to 
the more regular ones.