Lexemes and word forms: the situation outside English

In English, as we have seen, the number of word forms for any given lexeme is small. For verbs, the maximum is five (e.g. give, gives, gave, giving and given from GIVE) and for nouns the maximum is two (e.g. performance and performances from PERFORMANCE). That is, English makes relatively little use of inflectional morphology. But, as we have also seen, the picture was quite different a thousand years ago, in Old English. Moreover, Old English is by no means extreme in its use of inflection. In contemporary Turkish, it has been estimated that every verb has about two million forms! This is because a vast array of distinctions that in English are expressed syntactically and by means of pronouns, conjunctions and so on are expressed morphologically in Turkish. For example, the eight-word sentence We could not get the child to sit is rendered in Turkish by the two-word sentence Çocugu oturtamadık, where oturtamadık is analyzable as otur- ‘sit’, -t- ‘cause’, -a- ‘(not) be able’, -ma- ‘not’, dı- ‘past’, -k ‘we’.

The behavior of languages like Turkish demonstrates (if any demonstration is needed) that not every form of every lexeme can be separately memorized. We saw that, in Inuit, the great majority of lexemes themselves cannot be separately memorized either, inasmuch as lexemes in Inuit constitute a category as open-ended as sentences are in English. This means that, in a book on Turkish morphology, the equivalent would need to be much more elaborate than here, while in a book on Inuit, the extra elaboration would involve instead (or in addition). Consequently, to native speakers of Turkish and Inuit, English morphology may seem rather thin and impoverished. By contrast, to native speakers of Vietnamese, it may seem unnecessarily complicated. So, to the question ‘Is English an easy or a difficult language?’, no single answer can be given, at least in respect of its morphology. What English does clearly illustrate, however, is the complex mixture of regularity and idiosyncrasy that is characteristic of grammar in general and word structure in particular.