Derivation and Inflection

DERIVATION

Derivation is the process of formation of a new word from that of some existing words as the base or the root of this newly formed words. The process involved in the formation of the new word is addition of morpheme in the form of an affix (either prefix or suffix or both sometimes).The addition of the word or the affix takes place to the words of one lexical category (part of speech) and changes the words of some distinct and different category. For instance, the suffix ‘ly’, changes or transforms an adjective ‘true’ into an adverb ‘truly’ or ‘able’ as a suffix changes the word ‘presume’ to ‘presumable’; so on and so forth.

            Derivation has some characteristics, discussed under:

Ø Derivation on its occurrence brings about a great change in the meaning compared to the original or the root word.

Ø It often results in the grammatical change or the change of grammatical category of the word.

Ø Derivation is not an obligatory process.

Ø It although results in the idiosyncratic meaning of the transformed word.

Some examples are discussed below:

Ø Kind becomes the root word of Kindness.

Ø Joyful for the word Joy

English Derivative Pattern and their Suffixes:-

Noun to Verb: ‘fy’: glory-glorify

Verb to Noun(agent): ‘er: write- writer

Verb to Noun(abstract): ‘ance’: deliver-deliverance

Noun to Adjective :’al’: creation-creational

Adjective to Noun:- ‘ness’: Slow-Slowness

Verb to Adjective: ‘able’-drink-drinkable

Adjective to Verb: ‘ise’: Modern-modernise

Adjective to Adjective:- ‘ish’- black-blackish

Adjective to Adverb:- ‘ly’- person-personally

            However derivation is not necessary to undertake a change of form but rather the same word can be used for two purposes viz. Telephone as noun and to Telephone where it’s used as a verb. Also derivation resulting in a noun may be called Nominalization, involving the use an affix (Happy-happiness, employ-employee)

INFLECTION

Inflection in general refers to the nuance or the variety of same word. It is the grammatical variant of the same word which results in the change of  the form of a word purposed to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense, person, gender, case etc by means of adding one or two affixes; or the modification of the same word to express different grammatical categories viz. gender, tense etc. In English inflection is indicated in nouns (girl, girls, girls‘), third person singular present tense ( i, you, we, they buy; he buys), past tense (we walked, we walk), aspect ( i have called, I am calling) and degree:-comparatives (big, bigger, biggest). Also some inflection, changes occur as in, sing, sang, sung or goose, geese. Unlike derivation inflection doesn’t change the lexical or grammatical category of the word. In terms of their position, they occur outside the derivational affixes and affect the information such as number, gender or aspect. Inflective words are highly productive in nature as they result in the formation or generation of the words of the same type and further lead to the creation of the forms that are fully grounded and able to be integrated into discourse.

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