Need help/ derived words

[Giangpham97]

Hi everyone,

I am a teacher of lexicology, and using a textbook compiled by another teacher in my country. In his book, he divides words into three types: simple words (words with only one root morpheme), derived words (words with derivational morphemes, with such examples as interested), and compound words (words with at least two roots).
So the problem is what type of word do words with inflectional morphemes belong to? words with only a root and inflectional morpheme like said, books, interested, running - do they belong to "simple word" or "derived words", or we need to give another category "inflected words" apart from the three given types for the root + inflectional morpheme?

I am really longing for your advice as I have a class tomorrow, and I need to give a reasonable answer. Thank you.

[Daniel]

Hi and welcome to the forum! (I've moved your post to the right place for this question, by the way.)

One problem is the definition of "word". I am assuming that "word" means "word form", that is any form including derivational and/or inflectional affixes. If this is correct, then the grouping is:

1. Simple (no morphology at all)
2. Derived (any inflectional and/or derivational morphology)
3. Compound (two bases, plus, I guess, any additional morphology-- I guess this would also include polysynthetic/incorporating words by the definition you gave)

Alternatively if we think of "word" as meaning "lexeme" (the base for any lexical entry) then the inflections are not really new "words", so we could think of it like:

1. Simple (any word without derivational morphology)
2. Derived (any word with derivational morphology)
3. Compound (any word with multiple bases; probably also any derivational morphology?)

That actually makes more sense from a technical perspective, but I do not think that a textbook would present it that way, unless it makes this point clearly somewhere.

So I think the first viewpoint is correct. In other words, the answer is simple: the book is not (or at least not yet) distinguishing between derivational and inflectional morphology. This is a problem, but maybe it is dealt with later? If not, I would certainly recommend that you add it to the discussion during your lecture, at LEAST as a point the students might be interested in or want to know for a future class or for research, even if it isn't going to be required for exams, etc., because of the book.

It's also possible it's hard to distinguish between inflectional and derivational morphology in some cases so the author isn't making the distinction for that reason. But generally speaking it's usually possible in most cases, even if there may be some difficulties.

However, based on your username, I'm now curious about which country/language you're talking about. I recently read blog entry about Thai morphology that shows there is no inflection but there is some derivation (plus there is also compounding, I believe). Maybe the book you're using is specifically for Thai or a language like it that doesn't have inflectional morphology? In that case, the book is fine for that language, but not complete for a language like English, so you could add that additional information.
The blog entry is here by the way: http://journeytothai.blogspot.com/2006/11/thai-morphology.html