52 Summary

In this chapter, we saw that many words are made up of meaningful pieces called morphemes. In English, the most common bound morphemes are suffixes and prefixes, which can be affixed to words to derive new words, or can convey grammatical information via inflection. Although English has a very productive system of derivational morphology, its inflectional morphology is quite sparse. We looked at some Indigenous languages to examine the kinds of grammatical information that can be represented with inflectional morphemes.