Grammatical Categories and Markers

Can you find some antonyms among the grammatical markers?

• Due to the nature of the meanings of a grammatical morpheme one can hardly speak of antonyms
• unless the various cases of forms in binary opposition are considered to be antonyms, since they exclude each other

Can you find some antonyms among the grammatical markers?

• the presence of the -s morpheme marking the plural form of the noun
• could be considered to be an antonym to
• the zero morpheme pointing to the form of the singular
• table0º-tables

Can you find other antonyms among the grammatical markers?

• the presence of the -s morpheme in a verbal form marks the 3rd p. sg. of the Present Simple Tense
• the zero morpheme, points to a form which is not the 3rd p. sg. of the Present Simple Tense, etc.
• work-works

There are several instances of fluctuation with grammatical morphemes

• A grammatical morpheme can preserve its grammatical meaning and at the same time it can acquire a lexical one
• Example: the substantival suffix -s marking the plural of some nouns in English

-s can at the same time have the meaning of 'two similar parts'.

-s can mark the plural and at the same time acquire a word formative function

• customs colours

The same suffix can be traced in words like

• linguistics
• logics ‘science of ’
• mathematics

A different case is the word

• the former suffix -s has lost its nature of a morpheme entirely and has merged with the preceding morpheme, thus becoming part of it

J.Molhova calls this process degrammatization (or lexicalization) of grammatical markers.