Nominalized inflectional morphemes

[Dennis R. Preston]

A nonce use I'm pretty sure, but I once heard a non-native speaker
criticized for "inging" too much (though we certainly have no
nominalization in that). English inflectional morphology is so paucal
(and opaque) you wouldn't expect much word-formation. (Of course, the
social meaning may be enormous. Fail to attach a 3rd person
indicative marker on a present tense verb and you might as well kiss
you parentage and future goodbye.

dInIs


>At 12:05 PM -0500 8/30/02, Gordon, Matthew J. wrote:
>>A fairly recent example of a derivational morpheme becoming nominal
>>is "un" as used in the 7up ads of a few years ago (e.g., Are you an
>>un?).
>>
>And there are others--"anti", "pro" (though the latter can also be a
>preposition), "pre" and "post" on occasion.  But the inflectional
>ones would be rarer if they occurred at all (besides the Latin one
>cited).   "-ism", cited by Thomas Joyce, is also derivational.
>
>Larry