Derivational Morpheme or Inflectional Morpheme—A Case Study of “-ing” or “-ed” Word Ending in English Linguistics Teaching

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-02-2_74How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Inflectional morpheme; Derivational morpheme; “-ed” word ending; “-ing” word ending; Distinction

Abstract

The learning of morphology plays a very important role in students’ language learning. However, in the learning process, students feel very confused about inflectional and derivational morphemes and couldn’t distinguish their types especially when it comes to the “-ed” or “-ing” word ending. To help them better understand this question, this paper first reviewed the definitions and their sub-types of these two terms according to different literature. Then, it summarized the major differences of inflectional and derivational morphemes. Next, it focused on analyzing the specific morpheme type of “-ed” or “-ing” endings in words and in sentences. Last, it is concluded that whether “-ed” or “-ing” word ending is an inflectional morpheme or a derivational morpheme depends on whether it expresses lexical meaning or grammatical meaning. If “-ed” is used to form an adjective or “-ing” is used to form an adjective or a noun, the lexical meaning is expressed, then the “-ed” or “-ing” word ending acts as a derivational morpheme. While when grammatical meanings such as tense and aspect of verbs are conveyed in a sentence, “-ed” or “-ing” word ending is an inflectional morpheme. Besides, whether the syntactic category of “-ed” or “-ing” word ending is changed or not also can distinguish inflectional morphemes from derivational morphemes: if not changed, probably inflectional morphemes and if changed, derivational morphemes. Last, its contribution to the syntactic construction and its function in the sentence should be taken into full consideration in distinguishing inflectional morphemes from derivational ones.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Panpan Cao
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/11/14
TI  - Derivational Morpheme or Inflectional Morpheme—A Case Study of “-ing” or “-ed” Word Ending in English Linguistics Teaching
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Education: Current Issues and Digital Technologies (ICECIDT 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 682
EP  - 690
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-02-2_74
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-02-2_74
ID  - Cao2022
ER  -