Gramatica Ejercicios

The structure of words: morphology

Lexical words can consist of a single morpheme (a stem, such as go, book, cat), or
they can have a more complex structure created by a process of inflection,derivation or compounding. These processes are described below.
A Inflection
Inflectional words can take inflectional suffixes to signal meanings and roles which
are important to their word class,such as 'plural' in the case of nouns, and 'past
tense' in the case of verbs. The following word classes are marked by inflection:
word class base form example forms with inflectional suffixesnouns boy plural (boys), genitive (boy's, boys')
verbs live, write singular present tense (lives, writes), past tense
(lived, wrote), past participle (lived, written),
ing-participle (living, writing)adjectives dark comparative (darker), superlative (darkest)
adverbs soon comparative (sooner), superlative (soonest)
Other classes of words are generally invariable. For example, prepositions (e.g.of,
in, with), conjunctions (e.g. if, while, unless) and determiners (e.g. the, each,
several) have only one form.
B Derivation
Derivation, like inflection, usually involves adding an affix, i.e.a morpheme
attached to the beginning of a word (a prefix) or to the end of a word (a suffix).
However, this process is different from inflection because inflection does not
change the identity ofa word (i.e. it remains the same lexeme), while derivation
creates new nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Derivation changes the
meaning or word class of a word, and often both, and in effectcreates a new base
form for the word:
prefixes: ex + president, un + kind, re + read, a +broad
suffixes: boy + hood, central + ize, green + ish, exact + ly
Words can be built up using a number ofdifferent prefixes and suffixes, and
can thus contain several morphemes:
industri + al, industri + a1 + ize, industri + a1 + iz + ation,
post + industri + a1
Notice that inflections, such as -ed...