English Grammar: Verb Forms and Tenses

Inflectional Morphemes in Song Lyrics

• Inflectional morphemes change the form of words but do not change their meaning.
• Inflectional morphemes can change to other types, such as:
  • Simple present tense
  • Simple past tense
  • Plural
  • Progressive
  • Gerund
• This is to emphasize the meaning of words.

Song: "You Are the Reason"

• Examples of inflectional morphemes found:
  • -es (third-person singular)
  • -ing (progressive)
  • -en (past perfect)
  • -s (plural)
  • -er (comparative)

Song: "If You Ever Change Your Mind"

• Examples of inflectional morphemes found:
  • -s (plural)
  • -ed (past tense)
  • -ed (past perfect)
  • -ing (progressive)
  • -s (possessive)
  • -s (third-person singular)

Song: "Rise"

• Examples of inflectional morphemes found:
  • -ing (progressive)
  • -ing (gerund or noun)
  • -ing (gerund or noun)
  • -s (plural)

Conclusion

• Inflectional morphemes are additions to words that maintain the core meaning of the base word.
• They conform to grammatical and usage norms.
• Multiple morphemes were found embedded in the lyrics of Calum Scott's songs on the album Bridges.

Word Formation Processes

• Coinage is a word formation process that invents a new word that has not existed before, e.g. ebaying, xeroxing, and googling.
• Compounding is a process of joining two words to create a single word, e.g. footprint, girlfriend, textbook, and notebook.
• Blending is a process of combining two separate words to form a single word, but with parts of the words removed, e.g. motel (motor + hotel), brunch (breakfast + lunch), and staycation (stay + vacation).
• Clipping is a process of shortening words from the original ones, e.g. ad (advertisement), pop (popular music), and gas (gasoline).
• Back formation is a process of forming a new word from an existing word by reducing it to form a new part of speech, e.g. lazy (laze), edit (editor), and actor (act).
• Conversion is a process of forming a new word class from an existing word that involves zero derivation, e.g. the word need as a noun and need as a verb.
• Acronym is a process of forming a new word using the initial letters of a group of words, e.g. WHO (World Health Organization), ASAP (As Soon As Possible), and RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging).
• Derivation is a process of forming a new word from an existing word with the addition of bound morphemes, e.g. happiness from happy + -ness and sadly from sad + -ly.
• Multiple process is a process that involves more than one process to form a word, e.g. snowball (compounding) and snowballed (compounding + conversion).

Examples of Word Formation Processes

• Cups: derivation (N [N cup] [Aff s])
• DIY: multiple process (N [v do] [Det it] [Det your] [Aff self]] [N note] [N book])
• Spotify: blending (N [N spot] [V identify] [Aff -ify])
• CapCut: blending (N [V capture] [N cap]] [v cut])
• Makeup Plus: multiple process (N [V make] [Prep up] [N makeup]] [Adj plus])
• Beautify: derivation (N [N beauty] [Aff fy])
• StoryLab: multiple process (N [N story] [N laboratory] [N lab])
• PUBG: multiple process (N [V play] [Aff er]] [V know] [V known] [Adj unknown]
• StromGain: compounding (N [N storm] [N gain])
• Cryptogram: compounding (N [N crypto] [N gram])

Research Findings

• Multiple processes dominate the other processes, occurring in 4 applications.
• Compounding processes occurred in 2 applications, followed by blending processes with 2 occurrences, and 2 in the derivation process.
• Clipping, acronym, coinage, and borrowing processes were not found in this study.

Literature Review

• Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and how they are formed.
• Word formation process is the rules of how to produce new words.
• There are eight word formation processes in morphology, including borrowing, coinage, compounding, blending, clipping, back formation, conversion, acronym, derivation, and multiple processes.