22 English Inflection and Derivation

Modern English approaches the ideal of an isolating language. Open-class items have comparatively few forms, so that many inflectional categories either remain unmarked, or are expressed periphrastically. The inflectional system is particularly simple, even by the standards of a West Germanic language. Regular paradigms contain at most four forms, and the inflectional exponents that distinguish these forms do not show much variation, apart from some phonologically conditioned allomorphy. English retains a number of ‘strong’ noun and verb forms, along with a few other irregular formations. These residual patterns do occasionally recruit a historically weak item, as in the case of dove or snuck, which, for many North American speakers, may replace the weak preterites dived and sneaked (Taylor 1994). However, the creation of new strong forms is so rare and sporadic that one cannot regard the strong patterns as productive inflection classes in any useful sense. The derivational system is considerably richer and more varied. In addition to compounding processes and ‘minor’ word formation processes, which are covered in greater length in chapter 21 of this volume, English has various prefixal and suffixal strategies for forming new lexemes. As with inflectional patterns, it is important to distinguish productive from non-productive patterns, in order to avoid overstating the complexity of the derivational system. Mixing synchronic and historical patterns leads to the idea that English contains separate Latinate and Germanic sublexicons, and that a given derivational exponent may occur either with Latinate or Germanic bases. Chomsky and Halle (1968) distinguish between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ affixes, whereas Aronoff (1976) introduces a feature [±Latinate], which allows affixes to ‘select’