Lexical Process vs Inflectional Process

[Lighthouse1971b]

I have been studying Rodney Huddleston's "Introduction to the Grammar of English." I have found it quite difficult to grasp how to tell the difference between words that are inflections of the same lexeme vs. words that are separate lexemes.

I can see that a set of inflections from a lexeme influence/are influenced by the internal structure/syntax of the sentence (for identification purposes) and form a syntactic class.

I can also see that the pairs "wind" and "unwind" or "large" and "enlarge" are separate lexemes because "un-" and "en-" prefixation do not form a syntactic class of their own. Also, there is no syntactic rule dictating that "un-" or "en-" prefixation must take place in certain internal structures. Rather, the difference is one of semantics not syntax.

Also, inflections of a lexeme do not all have to belong to the same part of speech; however, specifically with verbs, they always do.

Is that all there is to it? I hope somebody can help me with this.

[lolwhites]

Excuse my ignorance, but I don't think I understand your question
Can you give some more examples of what you're asking about?

[CS]

What Is Inflection? (Click Here)

1. Inflection does not result in a change of word class (e.g. eat (vb.) => eats (vb.)), whereas Derivation can (e.g. advise (vb.) => advisor (n.) with addition of the derivational suffix -or).

2. Inflection often specifies when an event or situation took place, who or what were the participants, and sometimes where, how or whether an event or situation really took place. In other words, roots can be inflected for such things as agreement in person, number, and gender, as well as tense, aspect, and mode.

3. Inflection is grammatically required in certain syntactic environments. The main verb of an English sentence must be inflected for subject and tense. Inflections tend to be regular and productive and tend to occur in paradigms (e.g. I walk, you walk, she walks, etc).·

In the following English sentence, come is inflected for person and number by the suffix -s: "The mailman comes about noon."

In the following Spanish noun phrase, las and rojas are inflected for agreement with manzanas in grammatical gender by -a and in number by -s: "las manzanas rojas" (‘the red apples’).

[Lighthouse1971b]

You've really helped me. Thanks for that explanation. I find Huddleston a bit cryptic at times. I think I basically had it right, but not quite. Thanks for your time.