Introducing English Linguistics

Inflectional and derivational morphemes
Bound morphemes are of two types: inflectional and derivational.
Because English has so few inflections, they can simply be listed, as is
done in Table 6.1. Inflections are one type of grammatical morpheme, a
morpheme that indicates some kind of grammatical relationship. For
English words: Structure and meaning
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Table 6.1. Inflections in English
Inflections
Description
Examples
-s
3rd person present tense singular
He/she likes movies
Possessive
the child’s toy
Plural
girl/girls
-ing
Progressive aspect
He/she is leaving
-ed
Past tense/perfective aspect
He/she talked for an hour
He/she has talked for an 
hour
-er
Comparative form of adjective
mild/milder
-est
Superlative form of adjective
mild/mildest

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instance, the -s morpheme on likes marks the tense as present and the
subject as singular. The -s on the noun girls marks the noun as plural.
Some free morphemes are also grammatical. While the -s on child’s indi-
cates possession, so does the preposition of in the roof of the building or some
friends of mine. The comparative and superlative inflections are typically
used on adjectives that are one or two syllables long (e.g. happy, happier,
happiest). However, lengthier adjectives require more and most (e.g. beauti-
ful, more beautiful, most beautiful). Other free grammatical morphemes
include the articles (a, an, the), auxiliary verbs (be, have), and coordinating
conjunctions (and, or, but).
While inflectional morphemes form a small class in English, deriva-
tional morphemes are a much larger class. Merriam-Webster’s A
Dictionary of Prefixes, Suffixes, and Combining Forms, for instance, devotes
nearly sixty pages to a description of the various derivational morphemes
found on English words. Derivational morphemes exhibit other differ-
ences from inflectional morphemes as well. Derivational morphemes can
be either prefixes or suffixes, whereas inflectional morphemes can be
only suffixes. Unlike inflectional morphemes, derivational morphemes
can change the meaning of a word or its part of speech: adding dis- to the
base like results in a word – dislike – with a completely opposite meaning;
adding -able to  like changes  like from a verb to an adjective: likeable.
Adding -ed to a verb such as walk changes neither the meaning of walk nor
its part of speech.
A word can contain many derivational affixes, but only one inflectional
affix; and if a word contains an inflectional suffix and one or more
derivational suffixes, the derivational suffixes will always precede the
inflectional suffixes. In the examples below, the inflectional affixes are in
boldface and the derivational affixes in italics:
declassified: de
 class  ify  ed
unlikeliest: un
 like  ly  est
disempowering: dis
 em  power ing
reformulations: re
 formula ate  ation  s
As these words indicate, when affixes are combined in a word, the spelling
of an individual affix will often differ from its spelling in the word in
which it is included. As a later section will show, because English words
can contain many different derivational affixes,