the difference between them with the following ways: (1) Inflectional affixes very often add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem. E.g. toys, walks, John’s, etc. Therefore, they serve to produce different forms of a single word. In contrast, derivational affixes often change the lexical meaning. E.g. cite, citation, etc.
(2) Inflectional affixes don’t change the word class of the word they attach to, such as flower, flowers, whereas derivational affixes might or might not, such as the relation between small and smallness for the former, and that between brother and brotherhood for the latter.
(3) Inflectional affixes are often conditioned by nonsemantic linguistic factors outside the word they attach to but within the phrase or sentence. E.g. the choice of likes in “The boy likes to navigate on the internet.” is determined by the subject the boy in the sentence, whereas derivational affixes are more often based on simple meaning distinctions. E.g. The choice of clever and cleverness depends on whether we want to talk about the property “clever” or we want to talk about “the state of being clever.”
(4) In English, inflectional affixes are mostly suffixes, which are always word final. E.g. drums, walks, etc. But
derivational affixes can be prefixes or suffixes. E.g. depart, teacher, etc.
3.2.3 Inflection and word formation 1. Inflection
Inflection is the manifestation of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect and case, which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached. 2. Word formation
Word formation refers to the process of word variations signaling lexical relationships. It can be further subclassified into the compositional type (compound) and derivational type (derivation). (1) Compound
Compounds refer to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a single form, such as ice-cream, sunrise, paper bag, railway, rest-room, simple-minded, wedding-ring, etc. The head of a nominal or an adjectival endocentric compound is deverbal, that is, it is derived from a verb. Consequently, it is also called a verbal compound or a synthetic compound. Usually, the first member is a participant of the process verb.
E.g. Nouns: self-control, pain-killer, etc. Adjectives: virus-sensitive, machine washable, etc. The exocentric compounds are formed by V + N, V + A, and V + P, whereas the exocentric come from V + N and V + A. E.g. Nouns: playboy, cutthroat, etc. Adjectives: breakneck, walk-in, etc. (2) Derivation
Derivation shows the relation between roots and suffixes. In contrast with inflections, derivations can make the word class of the original word either changed or unchanged. 3.2.4 The counterpoint of phonology and morphology 1. Allomorph: Any of the different forms of a morpheme.
2. Morphophonology / morphophonemics: Morphophonology is a branch of linguistics referring to the analysis and classification of the phonological factors that affect the appearance of morphemes, and correspondingly, the grammatical factors that affect the appearance of phonemes. It is also called morphonology or morphonemics.
3. Assimilation: Assimilation refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound, which is more specifically called “contact” or “contiguous” assimilation.
4. Dissimilation: Dissimilation refers to the influence exercised by one sound segment upon the articulation of another, so that the sounds become less alike, or different. 3.3 Lexical change
3.3.1 Lexical change proper 1. Invention
Since economic activities are the most important and dynamic in human life, many new lexical items come directly from the consumer items, their producers or their brand names. 2. Blending
Blending is a relatively complex form of compounding, in which two words are blended by joining the initial part of the first word and the final part of the second word, or by joining the initial parts of the two words. 3. Abbreviation / clipping
A new word is created by cutting the final part, cutting the initial part or cutting both the initial parts of the original words.
4. Acronym
Acronym is made up from the first letters of the name of an organization, which has a heavily modified headword. 5. Back-formation
Back-formation refers to an abnormal type of word-formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imaged affix from a longer form already in the language. 6. Analogical creation
The principle of analogical creation can account for the co-existence of two forms, regular and irregular, in the conjugation of some English verbs. 7. Borrowing
English in its development has managed to widen her vocabulary by borrowing words from other languages. Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Arabic and other languages have all played an active role in this process. 3.3.2 Phonological change
1.Loss The loss of sound can first refer to the disappearance of the very sound as a phoneme in the phonological system. The loss of sounds may also occur in utterances at the expense of some unstressed words. 2. Addition Sounds may be lost but they may also be added to the original sound sequence.
3.Metathesis Metathesis is a process involving an alternation in the sequence of sounds. Metathesis had been originally a performance error, which was overlooked and