Lakhasly

The rather neat chart presented here conceals a number of outstanding problems in the analysis of English morphology.Consequently, there is no derivational relationship between the noun law and the adjective legal in English, nor between the noun mouth (from Old English) and the adjective oral (a Latin borrowing).Consequently, a full description of English morphology will have to take account of both historical influences and the effect of borrowed elements.So far, we have only considered examples of English words in which the different morphemes are easily identifiable as separate elements.And if -al is the derivational suffix added to the stem institution to give us institutional, then can we take -al off the word legal to get the stem leg?

The rather neat chart presented here conceals a number of outstanding problems in the
analysis of English morphology. So far, we have only considered examples of English
words in which the different morphemes are easily identifiable as separate elements.
The inflectional morpheme -s is added to cat and we get the plural cats. What is
the inflectional morpheme that makes sheep the plural of sheep, or men the plural
of man? And if -al is the derivational suffix added to the stem institution to give us
institutional, then can we take -al off the word legal to get the stem leg? Unfortunately,
the answer is “No.”
There are other problematic cases, especially in the analysis of different languages,
but the solutions to some of these problems are clearer in some instances than in
others. For example, the relationship between law and legal is a reflection of the
historical influence of different languages on English word forms. The modern form
law is a result of a borrowing into Old English (lagu) from a Scandinavian source over
1,000 years ago. The modern word legal was borrowed about 500 years later from the
Latin form legalis (“of the law”). Consequently, there is no derivational relationship
between the noun law and the adjective legal in English, nor between the noun mouth
(from Old English) and the adjective oral (a Latin borrowing). An extremely large
number of English words owe their morphological patterning to languages like Latin
and Greek. Consequently, a full description of English morphology will have to take
account of both historical influences and the effect of borrowed elements.