Лексикология английского языка

Москва

Издательство «ФЛИНТА»
2018

3-е издание, стереотипное

2

ISBN 9785976508446

УДК  811.111’37(075.8)
ББК  81.432.13я73

УДК 811.111’37(075.8)
ББК 81.432.13я73

К29

К29

Катермина В.В.
Лексикология английского языка [Ýëåêòðîííûé ðåñóðñ] : 
ïрактикум  / В.В. Катермина. — 3-е изд., стер. — М. : 
ФЛИНТА, 2018. — 120 с.

ISBN 9785976508446

В практикум вошли упражнения для семинарских занятий по английской 
лексикологии. Материал подобран по разделам: морфология, семасиология, 
этимология, лексикография. Пособие призвано помочь студентам в практическом овладении основами лексикологии.
Для студентов филологических факультетов университетов и факультетов 
иностранных языков пединститутов.

© Катермина В.В., 2010
© Издательство «ФЛИНТА», 2010

CONTENTS

Preface . ............................................................................................................................ 4

1.
Morphology . ........................................................................................................... 5

1.1.
Morphemes . ................................................................................................... 5

1.2.
Morphological Processes . ........................................................................... 14

2.
Semasiology . ......................................................................................................... 24

2.1.
Meaning and Reference ............................................................................... 24

2.2.
Diction and Tone . ........................................................................................ 26

3.
Etymology . ............................................................................................................ 38

3.1.
Historical Development . ............................................................................. 38

3.2.
Loanwords . .................................................................................................. 43

4.
Lexicography ........................................................................................................ 57

4.1.
How To Use Dictionaries ............................................................................ 57

4.2.
A Brief History of English Lexicography ................................................... 64

5.
Reference Material .............................................................................................. 68

Glossary ....................................................................................................................... 108

Recommended Literature . .......................................................................................... 115

Р е ц е н з е н т ы:

др филол. наук, профессор кафедры английской филологии

Кубанского государственного университета Ю.К. Волошин;

др филол. наук, профессор кафедры современного русского языка

Кубанского государственного университета Л.А. Исаева

2

ISBN 9785976508446 (Флинта)
ISBN 9785020371675 (Наука)

УДК  811.111’37(075.8)
ББК  81.2Англ3

УДК 811.111’37(075.8)
ББК 81.2Англ3
К29

Катермина В.В.
К29
Лексикология английского языка: Практикум / В.В. Катермина. — М. : Флинта : Наука, 2010. — 120 с.

ISBN 9785976508446 (Флинта)
ISBN 9785020371675 (Наука)

В практикум вошли упражнения для семинарских занятий по английской
лексикологии. Материал подобран по разделам: морфология, семасиология,
этимология, лексикография. Пособие призвано помочь студентам в практическом овладении основами лексикологии.
Для студентов филологических факультетов университетов и факультетов
иностранных языков пединститутов.

© Катермина В.В., 2010
© Издательство «Флинта», 2010

CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................................... 4

1.
Morphology ....................................................................................................... 5

1.1.
Morphemes ................................................................................................ 5

1.2.
Morphological Processes ......................................................................... 14

2.
Semasiology ...................................................................................................... 24

2.1.
Meaning and Reference ............................................................................ 24

2.2.
Diction and Tone ...................................................................................... 26

3.
Etymology ........................................................................................................ 38

3.1.
Historical Development ........................................................................... 38

3.2.
Loanwords ............................................................................................... 43

4.
Lexicography ................................................................................................... 57

4.1.
How To Use Dictionaries ......................................................................... 57

4.2.
A Brief History of English Lexicography ................................................. 64

5.
Reference Material .......................................................................................... 68

Glossary ................................................................................................................. 108

Recommended Literature ........................................................................................ 115

Р е ц е н з е н т ы:

др филол. наук, профессор кафедры английской филологии
Кубанского государственного университета Ю.К. Волошин
др филол. наук, профессор кафедры современного русского языка
Кубанского государственного университета Л.А. Исаева

4

Preface

Vocabulary is the Everest of a language. There is no larger task than
to look for order among the hundreds of thousands of words which comprise the lexicon. There may be many greater tasks — working out a coherent grammatical system is certainly one — but nothing beats lexical
study for sheer quantity and range.
How big is the lexicon of English? How many words do any of us
know? And how do we calculate size, with such an amorphous phenomenon? Defining the basic unit to be counted turns out to be an unexpected difficulty, and the notion of lexeme is introduced.
Where does the vastness of the lexicon come from? There is an important balance between the stock of native words and the avalanche of
foreign borrowings into English over centuries. The use of prefixes, suffixes, compounding, and other processes of word-building turns out to
play a crucial role in English vocabulary growth.
The present book is a book of exercises in Modern English lexicology. It is written for the students of Universities, Foreign Languages and
Pedagogical Institutes who take English as their special subject. The
book is meant as the additional illustrative language material for seminars in lexicology.
The material is divided into more or less autonomous parts (morphology, semasiology, etymology, lexicography) each providing working definitions, tasks, and exercises.
Brief notes preceding the exercises are offered as a kind of guide to
the students and by no means claim at a thorough theoretical treatment
of a subject.

But There Are No Such Things as Words!

Jabberwocky
Lewis Carroll
Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Remember the Jabberwocky’s song in Carol’s “Through the LookingGlass”? Pretty meaningless, huh? Still, it sounds “English” rather than,
say, French or German or Italian. That is why it is so amusing: it sounds
like perfect English yet we cannot understand it.
Actually, we understand quite a bit about the poem even though we
don’t understand it as a whole. For example, what do we know about
“toves”? Well, we know that there are more than one of them and that
those mentioned here are “slithy”, whatever that is. We know that
“slithy” describes the “toves” as either like a slithe or having slithes. We
know that these slithy toves “gyred” and “gimbled”, and even though we
don’t know what these actions are we know they are actions and something about when they took place. How do we know all this, not knowing what any of the boldface parts of the words mean?
The reason we know so much about the meaningless words in Carol’s poem is that some of the words and parts of words are, in fact, English. The English words are small, less prominent words, barely more
prominent in their pronunciation than the parts of words, the prefixes
and suffixes. These small words and parts of words (in plain type above)
are expressions that tell us nothing about the world, but only about the
grammatical categories of the English language; let’s call them morphemes, just to have a term for them.
The nonsense parts of the words in the Jabberwocky song above are
all noun, verb, and adjective stems, the main parts of words without pre

4

Preface

Vocabulary is the Everest of a language. There is no larger task than
to look for order among the hundreds of thousands of words which comprise the lexicon. There may be many greater tasks — working out a coherent grammatical system is certainly one — but nothing beats lexical
study for sheer quantity and range.
How big is the lexicon of English? How many words do any of us
know? And how do we calculate size, with such an amorphous phenomenon? Defining the basic unit to be counted turns out to be an unexpected difficulty, and the notion of lexeme is introduced.
Where does the vastness of the lexicon come from? There is an important balance between the stock of native words and the avalanche of
foreign borrowings into English over centuries. The use of prefixes, suffixes, compounding, and other processes of word-building turns out to
play a crucial role in English vocabulary growth.
The present book is a book of exercises in Modern English lexicology. It is written for the students of Universities, Foreign Languages and
Pedagogical Institutes who take English as their special subject. The
book is meant as the additional illustrative language material for seminars in lexicology.
The material is divided into more or less autonomous parts (morphology, semasiology, etymology, lexicography) each providing working definitions, tasks, and exercises.
Brief notes preceding the exercises are offered as a kind of guide to
the students and by no means claim at a thorough theoretical treatment
of a subject.

But There Are No Such Things as Words!

Jabberwocky
Lewis Carroll
Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Remember the Jabberwocky’s song in Carol’s “Through the LookingGlass”? Pretty meaningless, huh? Still, it sounds “English” rather than,
say, French or German or Italian. That is why it is so amusing: it sounds
like perfect English yet we cannot understand it.
Actually, we understand quite a bit about the poem even though we
don’t understand it as a whole. For example, what do we know about
“toves”? Well, we know that there are more than one of them and that
those mentioned here are “slithy”, whatever that is. We know that
“slithy” describes the “toves” as either like a slithe or having slithes. We
know that these slithy toves “gyred” and “gimbled”, and even though we
don’t know what these actions are we know they are actions and something about when they took place. How do we know all this, not knowing what any of the boldface parts of the words mean?
The reason we know so much about the meaningless words in Carol’s poem is that some of the words and parts of words are, in fact, English. The English words are small, less prominent words, barely more
prominent in their pronunciation than the parts of words, the prefixes
and suffixes. These small words and parts of words (in plain type above)
are expressions that tell us nothing about the world, but only about the
grammatical categories of the English language; let’s call them morphemes, just to have a term for them.
The nonsense parts of the words in the Jabberwocky song above are
all noun, verb, and adjective stems, the main parts of words without pre

6

fixes or suffixes. Stems are also the linguistic things that refer to the
world we live in. Let’s call whole words and stems lexemes; they are
anything we use in speech that names or refers to things in the real
world. Morphemes will then be the words or parts of words that mark
the categories of grammar which are the crucial stuff of language. That
is why they control whether we sense a spoken or written utterance is
English or French or German.
No one has ever been able to define the word “word” despite gargantuan efforts to do so. The linguistic concept of word: an analytic bibliography by Alphonse Juilland and Alexandra Roceric is a 118-page bibliography of books and articles (unsuccessfully) attempting to define
‘word’ over the past 3 millennia. Why can no one define “word”? Maybe because words simply do not exist; rather, the sentences we speak are
composed of lexemes and morphemes and these two linguistic objects
differ too much to be subsumed under one concept.
The differences between these two linguistic elements are dramatic.
Here are the major ones.

Comparison of Lexemes and Morphemes

Let’s examine these differences. Lexemes, remember, are basically
noun, verb, and adjective stems or whole words: “violin”, “play”,
“small” are lexemes. They refer to things, actions, states, and qualities
in the real world. Suffixes like -ing, “-s”, “-ed”, prefixes like “re-”, “ex-”,
“un-”, particles like “the”, “not”, “so” and prepositions like “of”, “for”,
“to” are morphemes. They refer to grammatical categories like Progressive Aspect (“-ing”: “am going”), Plural Number (“-s”: “cars”), Past Tense
(-”ed”: “walked”), Negation (“un-, not”: “unwanted”), Definite (“the”:
“the cat”), Possession (“of”: “of my friend”).

Lexemes like “violin”, “play”, and “small” are subject to derivation,
a process which generates new words from others: “violin” > “violinist”, “play” > “play-er”, “small” > “small-ness”. Morphemes do not undergo derivation even if they are not affixes which mark derivations
themselves. We do not find words derived from “the”, “that”, “of”,
“for”, “it”.
Lexemes always comprise a sound plus a meaning but morphemes
may have either one but not the other. For example, if “-er” means
“someone who does something”, as in “runner”, “player”, “driver”, what
sound has that meaning in “(a) cook”, “(a) guide”, “(a) cut-up”? With
these verbs, all we have to do is use them in a noun position, e.g. “the
cook guided us through the kitchen”, and we know that the speaker is
using the noun, not the verb.
On the other hand, morphemes sometimes show up with sound but
not meaning. Take the adjectives that end on “-ic”, e.g. “histor-ic”,
meaning “having the property of history” from “history”. There are lots
of these derivations: “climat-ic”, “theatr-ic”, “semant-ic”. But look at
this series: “dram-at-ic”, “spasm-at-ic”, “enigm-at-ic”. The meaning of
these adjectives is the same as that of the “syntactic” class: “having the
properties of X”, where “X” is the meaning of the underlying word.
However, they contain an extra morpheme, “-at”. Why is that? Well, for
some reason known only to the ancient Greeks, who enjoyed the same
derivation, before adding “-ic” you had to insert a suffix “-at” if the stem
ended on an “m”. So, when English borrowed these words from Greece,
the rule came with it. The suffix “-at” probably had meaning in Greek
but it certainly has none in English, where it is simply required of all
words borrowed from Greek ending on “m” when the suffix “-ic” is applied. So not only do we find morpheme meanings without morphemes,
we find morphemes without morphemic meaning.
The sounds of lexemes are always predetermined and remain (more
or less) the same wherever they occur in a phrase. The sound of a morpheme on the other hand, especially prefixes and suffixes may vary
wildly. The future tense in Tagalog (or Philippino) is formed by adding
a prefix. For example, “bili” is the verb stem meaning “buy” and “bibili” means “will buy”. So, if “kuha” means “get”, “will get” should be
“bi-kuha”, right? Wrong. The future of “kuha” is “ku-kuha”. The verb

6

fixes or suffixes. Stems are also the linguistic things that refer to the
world we live in. Let’s call whole words and stems lexemes; they are
anything we use in speech that names or refers to things in the real
world. Morphemes will then be the words or parts of words that mark
the categories of grammar which are the crucial stuff of language. That
is why they control whether we sense a spoken or written utterance is
English or French or German.
No one has ever been able to define the word “word” despite gargantuan efforts to do so. The linguistic concept of word: an analytic bibliography by Alphonse Juilland and Alexandra Roceric is a 118-page bibliography of books and articles (unsuccessfully) attempting to define
‘word’ over the past 3 millennia. Why can no one define “word”? Maybe because words simply do not exist; rather, the sentences we speak are
composed of lexemes and morphemes and these two linguistic objects
differ too much to be subsumed under one concept.
The differences between these two linguistic elements are dramatic.
Here are the major ones.

Comparison of Lexemes and Morphemes

Let’s examine these differences. Lexemes, remember, are basically
noun, verb, and adjective stems or whole words: “violin”, “play”,
“small” are lexemes. They refer to things, actions, states, and qualities
in the real world. Suffixes like -ing, “-s”, “-ed”, prefixes like “re-”, “ex-”,
“un-”, particles like “the”, “not”, “so” and prepositions like “of”, “for”,
“to” are morphemes. They refer to grammatical categories like Progressive Aspect (“-ing”: “am going”), Plural Number (“-s”: “cars”), Past Tense
(-”ed”: “walked”), Negation (“un-, not”: “unwanted”), Definite (“the”:
“the cat”), Possession (“of”: “of my friend”).

Lexemes like “violin”, “play”, and “small” are subject to derivation,
a process which generates new words from others: “violin” > “violinist”, “play” > “play-er”, “small” > “small-ness”. Morphemes do not undergo derivation even if they are not affixes which mark derivations
themselves. We do not find words derived from “the”, “that”, “of”,
“for”, “it”.
Lexemes always comprise a sound plus a meaning but morphemes
may have either one but not the other. For example, if “-er” means
“someone who does something”, as in “runner”, “player”, “driver”, what
sound has that meaning in “(a) cook”, “(a) guide”, “(a) cut-up”? With
these verbs, all we have to do is use them in a noun position, e.g. “the
cook guided us through the kitchen”, and we know that the speaker is
using the noun, not the verb.
On the other hand, morphemes sometimes show up with sound but
not meaning. Take the adjectives that end on “-ic”, e.g. “histor-ic”,
meaning “having the property of history” from “history”. There are lots
of these derivations: “climat-ic”, “theatr-ic”, “semant-ic”. But look at
this series: “dram-at-ic”, “spasm-at-ic”, “enigm-at-ic”. The meaning of
these adjectives is the same as that of the “syntactic” class: “having the
properties of X”, where “X” is the meaning of the underlying word.
However, they contain an extra morpheme, “-at”. Why is that? Well, for
some reason known only to the ancient Greeks, who enjoyed the same
derivation, before adding “-ic” you had to insert a suffix “-at” if the stem
ended on an “m”. So, when English borrowed these words from Greece,
the rule came with it. The suffix “-at” probably had meaning in Greek
but it certainly has none in English, where it is simply required of all
words borrowed from Greek ending on “m” when the suffix “-ic” is applied. So not only do we find morpheme meanings without morphemes,
we find morphemes without morphemic meaning.
The sounds of lexemes are always predetermined and remain (more
or less) the same wherever they occur in a phrase. The sound of a morpheme on the other hand, especially prefixes and suffixes may vary
wildly. The future tense in Tagalog (or Philippino) is formed by adding
a prefix. For example, “bili” is the verb stem meaning “buy” and “bibili” means “will buy”. So, if “kuha” means “get”, “will get” should be
“bi-kuha”, right? Wrong. The future of “kuha” is “ku-kuha”. The verb

8

meaning “laugh” is “tawa”; “will laugh” is “ta-tawa”. Catch on? What
do you think the future of “sulat” “write” is? You are right if you
guessed “su-sulat”. Tagalog reduplicates the first syllable of the verb
stem to make a prefix. In other words, the sound of the prefix is not predetermined, but is determined by the sound of the stem. The morpheme
here is not a sound but a rule for creating sound. Only morphemes may
be rules for retrieving sound, never lexemes.

Tagalog Future Tense

An important difference between lexemes and morphemes is that the
former, but not the latter, belong to an open, unlimited class. That means
that there is no limit on the number of noun, verb, and adjective stems in
any language. New lexemes may be derived by compounding, affixation, and other rules; they may be borrowed from other languages or
simply made up. The number of morphemes, however, is limited to
around 200. Proto-Indo-European languages have fewer than 100. We
are currently being inundated by new lexemes describing the categories,
states and qualities of new technology. We never meet a new preposition
(of, for, by, with), pronoun (he, she, it), or article (a, the). The fact that the
number of morphemes and the categories they refer to is fixed suggests
that they determine the grammar of a language. That is why the Jabberwocky Song ‘sounds’ like English even though it is incomprehensible. It
is English with nonsense lexemes but real morphemes.
So, what is going on when we speak is a bit more subtle than stringing “words” together in phrases. Assuming that “on” is a word does not
distinguish between the lexeme “on” in “The oven is on” and the morpheme “on” in “on the table”. Why is this important? It helps us understand the important difference between grammar and vocabulary. The

meaning of “on” the morpheme, but not that of the lexeme may be expressed by a suffix in some languages (cf. Finnish and Hungarian, for
example). It helps us understand why children begin learning lexemes
around the age of one, about a year before they begin learning grammar,
represented by morphemes. They only begin picking up morphemes
around the age of two, when they begin using phrases. Finally, it helps
explain why chimpanzees can learn what seem to be lexemes but not
morphemes (morphemes represent grammar, the essential core of language). Morphemes convey the categories of grammar itself, so if we
want to understand language itself, we must understand first and foremost
morphemes. Lexemes are not going to tell us much about language.
Remember, the magic word is LINGUISTICS, a very new science,
indeed. Morphology is the study of words and their parts: morphemes
and lexemes. It examines the grammatical and semantic categories they
convey as well as the sounds and sound changes caused by combining
them. It also explores the relations of words in sentences.

What is morphology?
Morphology is the study of word structure. When linguists study
morphology, they are interested in the different categories of morphemes that make up words (including bound, free, derivational and
inflectional morphemes), as well as morphological processes for forming new words.

What are morphemes?
Morphemes are the smallest meaningful pieces of language that
make up words. Words may consist of one or more morphemes. For example, how many morphemes does the word “boys” contain? Right, two —
“boy” is one morpheme or meaningful chunk, and “s” is another (the “s”
here carries the grammatical meaning of plural). Other individual
sounds, such as the [b] in “boy,” however, are not morphemes because
they carry no individual meaning.

What are the different types of morphemes in English words?
In English, we can divide our morphemes along several dimensions.
One way to categorize them is in terms of bound and free classes.

8

meaning “laugh” is “tawa”; “will laugh” is “ta-tawa”. Catch on? What
do you think the future of “sulat” “write” is? You are right if you
guessed “su-sulat”. Tagalog reduplicates the first syllable of the verb
stem to make a prefix. In other words, the sound of the prefix is not predetermined, but is determined by the sound of the stem. The morpheme
here is not a sound but a rule for creating sound. Only morphemes may
be rules for retrieving sound, never lexemes.

Tagalog Future Tense

An important difference between lexemes and morphemes is that the
former, but not the latter, belong to an open, unlimited class. That means
that there is no limit on the number of noun, verb, and adjective stems in
any language. New lexemes may be derived by compounding, affixation, and other rules; they may be borrowed from other languages or
simply made up. The number of morphemes, however, is limited to
around 200. Proto-Indo-European languages have fewer than 100. We
are currently being inundated by new lexemes describing the categories,
states and qualities of new technology. We never meet a new preposition
(of, for, by, with), pronoun (he, she, it), or article (a, the). The fact that the
number of morphemes and the categories they refer to is fixed suggests
that they determine the grammar of a language. That is why the Jabberwocky Song ‘sounds’ like English even though it is incomprehensible. It
is English with nonsense lexemes but real morphemes.
So, what is going on when we speak is a bit more subtle than stringing “words” together in phrases. Assuming that “on” is a word does not
distinguish between the lexeme “on” in “The oven is on” and the morpheme “on” in “on the table”. Why is this important? It helps us understand the important difference between grammar and vocabulary. The

meaning of “on” the morpheme, but not that of the lexeme may be expressed by a suffix in some languages (cf. Finnish and Hungarian, for
example). It helps us understand why children begin learning lexemes
around the age of one, about a year before they begin learning grammar,
represented by morphemes. They only begin picking up morphemes
around the age of two, when they begin using phrases. Finally, it helps
explain why chimpanzees can learn what seem to be lexemes but not
morphemes (morphemes represent grammar, the essential core of language). Morphemes convey the categories of grammar itself, so if we
want to understand language itself, we must understand first and foremost
morphemes. Lexemes are not going to tell us much about language.
Remember, the magic word is LINGUISTICS, a very new science,
indeed. Morphology is the study of words and their parts: morphemes
and lexemes. It examines the grammatical and semantic categories they
convey as well as the sounds and sound changes caused by combining
them. It also explores the relations of words in sentences.

What is morphology?
Morphology is the study of word structure. When linguists study
morphology, they are interested in the different categories of morphemes that make up words (including bound, free, derivational and
inflectional morphemes), as well as morphological processes for forming new words.

What are morphemes?
Morphemes are the smallest meaningful pieces of language that
make up words. Words may consist of one or more morphemes. For example, how many morphemes does the word “boys” contain? Right, two —
“boy” is one morpheme or meaningful chunk, and “s” is another (the “s”
here carries the grammatical meaning of plural). Other individual
sounds, such as the [b] in “boy,” however, are not morphemes because
they carry no individual meaning.

What are the different types of morphemes in English words?
In English, we can divide our morphemes along several dimensions.
One way to categorize them is in terms of bound and free classes.

10

Bound morphemes are, as their name suggests, those that must be attached to a free morpheme. They cannot stand alone as a word. For example, “un-” is a bound morpheme. It does, in fact, have meaning
(roughly “not” or “reverse / opposite”). However, it usually does not
hang out by itself; it must be attached to free morphemes like “kind” or
“appealing” to form “unkind” or “unappealing”. The morphemes “-ity”
and “-ing” are also bound, needing to attach themselves to free morphemes such as “sincere” or “sing” to form “sincerity” or “singing”.
By now, you may have figured out that free morphemes are morphemes that can stand alone as words, thus giving them “free” status.
Words such as “kind”, “boy”, “ desk”, “the”, “to”, “clock”, “run”, are all
examples of free morphemes.

What else have you noticed about the differences between bound and
free morphemes?
Bound morphemes tend to be affixes (e.g. prefixes and suffixes),
attaching to the beginnings and ends of words. Free morphemes, on the
other hand, tend to be word roots, the strong building blocks conveying much of the core meanings of words. For example, what is the root
morpheme in “stylish”? Yes, it is “style”, and notice that this root is
also free; it can stand alone as a word. What about the suffix “-ish”? It
is a bound morpheme that must be attached to a free morpheme. (Note:
As Fromkin and Rodman point out, there are a few bound morphemes
in English that are roots, rather than affixes. For example, in the word
“inept”, one might identify “ept” as the root. But notice that this root
is usually bound rather than free. That is, few speakers tend to use
“ept” by itself.)
Bound morphemes that are prefixes or suffixes can be further divided into derivational and inflectional categories.

What are derivational and inflectional morphemes?
When affixes attach to words, they change the words in various
ways. Derivational affixes change the meaning or part of speech (grammatical category) of a word. For example, in the word “unkind”, the prefix “un-” is a derivational morpheme. Why? Because it changes the

meaning of the word. In this case, the meaning is changed to the opposite. Does it change the part of speech of the word? No, “kind” is an adjective and “unkind” is still an adjective. In the word “kindness”, what
about the suffix “-ness”? The suffix “-ness” is also derivational, and this
time it does change the part of speech of the word: “kind” is an adjective and “kindness” is a noun. Note that when you change part of
speech, you also change meaning; for example, the adjective “kind” has
a different meaning from the noun “kindness”.
Inflectional affixes are ones that do not change a word’s part of
speech or meaning (in a significant way) but rather add grammatical information about number (singular/plural), tense, person (first, second,
third), and any of a few other categories. For example, in the word
“obeyed”, can you identify any inflectional affixes? Yes, the suffix “-ed”
is inflectional; it adds grammatical information about past tense. Note
that it does not change the part of speech of the word (“obey” and “obeyed”
are both verbs), nor does it alter the core meaning of “obey”. In English,
we have very few inflectional affixes (a total of eight) and all of them
are suffixes. Thus, one would describe English as a weakly inflected
language. English used to have more grammatical inflections but these
have dropped out over time.

English Inflectional Affixes