An Analysis of Inflectional Morphemes in a Short Story “The Child’s Story” by Charles Dickens

This study aims to determine the inflectional morphemes found in the short story "The Child's Story" by Charles Dickens. The analysis shows 108 inflectional morphemes found in the short story "The Child's Story". There are 35 plural nouns “-s”, “-es” with 32.5% percentage as the most dominant inflectional morphemes found in this story. Next, possessive nouns “-'s”, “-s'” and comparative adjectives “-er” both show 2 data (1.8%), superlative adjectives “-est” shows 3 data (2.7%), 3rd person singular/present tense “-s” shows 4 data (3.7%), verb past tense “-ed”/”-d” shows 29 data (26.9%), Present participle “-ing” shows 32 data (29.7%), past participle verb “-en” shows 1 data (0.9%). In addition, Inflectional does not change the grammatical category of words consisting of "-s, -'s, -er, -est, -s, -ed, -ing, and -en". The suffix “-s” means plural. The suffix “-'s”, and “-s'” means possessive. The ending “-er” means comparative. The suffix “-est” means superlative. The ending “-ed” means past. The ending “-ing” means current (continuous). The ending “-en” means participle.


Introduction
Morphology is the study of word formation, including the way new words are generated in the world's languages and the way word forms vary depending on how they are created or used in sentences.According to Beard (1995), Morphology superficially is the sum of all the phonological means to express the relationship of word constituents, words in phrases, and phrasal constituents of sentences.Furthermore, Ifadloh (2021) explains that morphology plays an important role in linguistics since it discusses the structure of the words organised in a language.The rules of forming words have been the main material in morphology.From some of these opinions, it can be concluded that morphology is a branch of linguistics that identifies the basic units of language as grammatical units.This means that the process of forming the word influences changes in the form and meaning of a word.
According to Astuti et al. (2021), discussing morphology, it cannot be separated by morpheme.Morphemes become a crucial part of Morphology since they become the smallest unit in linguistics with a grammatical meaning.In morphology, there are terms inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes.These two morphological processes are quite important parts of the grammatical system.Inflection is the process of forming different words, but inflectional morphology deals with all forms of lexeme from the same lexeme.While derivation is a process of producing new lexemes, derivation morphology is more focused on forming new lexemes through the affixation process.Schmid (2015) states that both inflectional and derivational morphemes cannot occur by themselves because they must be attached to another morpheme; therefore, they are known as bound morphemes.Meanwhile, free morphemes can arise by themselves (autonomous).In addition, both bound morpheme and free morpheme are said to be different in terms of distribution or freedom of occurrence.The rule is that a lexeme consists of at least one free morpheme.
This study aims to find out how inflectional morphemes are realised in a short story entitled "the child's story" by Charles Dickens.Furthermore, it is conducted to know what types of inflectional morphemes are realized in a short story entitled "the child's story" by Charles Dickens.Hopefully, this study can give information related to inflectional morphemes, specifically realised in a short story, for language learners, lecturers and future researchers.
All word structure information relevant to syntax is always associated with inflectional morphology; the relationship between inflection morphology and the affixation process can be determined syntactically (Katamba, 1993).Further, it is explained that the standard intuition of linguists is that inflectional morphology is concerned with syntactically driven word formation (Katamba, 1993).Therefore, inflectional morphology always deals with syntactically determined affixation processes, while derivational morphology is used to create new lexical items.Booij (2007) stated that marking morphological properties on a lexeme produces a number of forms for that lexeme, a set of grammatical words inflection.Inflection is formed by using grammatical forms such as past, present, future, singular, plural, masculine, feminine, neuter, and so on of a single lexeme.The use of these grammatical forms is usually dictated by sentence structure.Thus, the auxiliaries such as is, are, and being are examples of inflected forms of the lexeme, which happens to be very irregular in English.On the other hand, in many different languages as well in English, regular verb lexemes have a lexical stem which is the basic form with no affixes (e.g., select) and three more forms of inflection, one each with the suffixes "-s", "-ed", and "-ing" (such as selects, selected, and selecting).In addition, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and other parts of speech typically have only one form, while noun lexemes have one singular and plural form (Aronoff & Fudeman 2011).
Examples of Words + Inflectional Morphemes Nouns: Inflectional morphology deals with any information about word structure relevant to syntax.The nature of word inflection is determined by syntax and depends on how the word interacts with other words in a phrase, clause, or sentence (Katamba, 1993:).It is the addition of affixes to a word to create a new word but does not change the class of the word.An example is the inflection of the words "book" (singular) and "books" (plural), both of them are nouns.Another example is the word "play", which can be changed to "played" or "playing; both are verbs.
Inflection is the process of adding an inflectional morpheme into a word that contains grammar such as number, person, gender, tense or aspect.It differs from derivational morpheme that produces a new word from a root.Furthermore, it sometimes can change the class of words, such as changing a noun to a verb.
According to Yule (2010), the set of affixes that makes up the category of bound morphemes can also be divided into two types; derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes.Derivational morphemes are used to make new words or words of a different grammatical category from the stem.On the contrary, inflectional morphemes are used to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word and do not have a function to produce new words.Further inflectionals are used to show whether a word is a plural, singular, past tense, comparative, or possessive.There are eight inflectional morphemes in English and are illustrated as follows: Mike's two brothers are different.One likes to have fun and is always laughing.The other liked to read as a child and has always taken things seriously.One is the loudest person in the house, and the other is quieter than a mouse.
In the first sentence, both possessive and plural form (-'s, -s) are called inflection.They are attached to nouns.There are four forms of inflection attached to verbs.They are "-ing" (the present participle), "-en" (past participle), "-s" (3rd person singular), and "-ed" (past tense).There are two forms of inflection attached to adjectives: "-er" (comparative) and "est" (superlative).All the inflectional morphemes in English are included as suffixes.
Noun + -'s, -s Verb + -s, -ing, -ed, -en Adjective + -er, -est These inflectional morphemes have some variations.For example, the possessive sometimes appears as -s' (those boys' bags) and the past participle as "-ed" (they have finished).Finkel and Stump (2007) state that the notion of inflection respites on the more basic notion of the lexeme.A lexeme is a unit of linguistic analysis which belongs to a particular syntactic category, has a specific meaning or grammatical function, and ordinarily come into syntactic combinations as a single word; in many cases, the identity of the word which realizes a particular lexeme varies systematically according to the syntactic context in which it is to be used.Thus, English has a verbal lexeme meaning 'sing' which enters into syntactic blends as either sing, sings, sang, sung, or singing, depending on its syntactic.Thus, based on the explanation above, it can be concluded that there are several categories of inflectional morphemes.The first is inflectional categories of nouns.Here, it uses the morpheme -s (orthographically-singular, -s' in the plural) to denote possession and the remainder of the genitive case.However, pronouns still show some differences when they are no longer marked by nouns (Lieber, 2009: 9).The examples are as follows: Inflection of nouns in the plural form is quite easy because it only puts "-s" to the end of the word; for example, the term "cat" becomes "cats".Nouns ending in s, ss, sh, ch, x and z can be inflected by adding "-es" at the end of the word; for example, the term "bus" becomes "buses", and the word "glass" becomes "glasses", the word "bush" becomes "bushes", the word "pitch" becomes "pitches", the term "box" becomes "boxes", etc.Meanwhile, nouns ending with a consonant followed by the letter "y" can be inflected by adding "-ies" to the word; for example, the term "ply" becomes "plies".In addition, nouns that end with a vowel and are followed by the letter "y" can be inflated by adding an "s" at the end of the word; for example, the term "toy" becomes "toys".
The second is inflectional categories of verbs.In verbs, inflectional morphology is indicated in the third person for the present tense, where "-s" points to a singular subject related to the number of participants.Furthermore, the English verb inflection is also found in the present tense and past tense, not for the future, and there are two participles (present with -ing and past with -ed) which are together with the auxiliary verb to support different aspects (Lieber, 2009: 99-100 Example: Present progressive I am watching a movie.Future progressive I will be watching a movie.Past progressive I was watching a movie.The perfect tense expresses something that happened in the past but still connects to the present.In English, it is shown by a past participle, and a form of the auxiliary "have".
Example: Perfect I have watched a movie The passive voice is also created with the past participle.The difference is that in this passive sentence you do not use auxiliary "have" any longer, but you must use the auxiliary "be".
Example: Passive A movie was watched by me.In English, there are also regular verb inflections and irregular verbs inflection.Regular verbs are suffixes, while irregular verbs are typically established by stem internal change or a combination between internal stem and suffixation (Lieber, 2009: 101) The inflectional of verbs has a rule not much different from the inflection of a noun, but changes in the inflectional verbs usually change more of a word.For example, the term "cry" can be "cries", "cried", and "crying".Another example can be seen in the word "jump", that can be "jumps", "jumped", and "jumping".
Next, the third inflectional category is the inflectional categories of adjectives.McCarthy (2002) states that every adjective lexeme must have a comparative and a superlative form (or, at any rate, every adjective pointing to a property that can be present to a greater or lesser degree).Therefore, every adjective will have three forms in one word class: positive, comparative and superlative.However, inflection categories of adjectives can happen in a regular pattern of fixation with "-er" and "-est" to adjective words that have special characteristics such as only has only one syllable, two syllables ended with "-y", two syllables ended with "-er", etc.The affix process, which consists of suffixes, prefixes, and infixes, can be studied in the concepts of inflection and derivation.Texts, books, novels, comics, and short stories can be used as objects to analyse inflectional and derivational morphology.However, inflectional is usually more dominant than derivational in a short story.Therefore, in this study, the discussion will focus on "the inflectional analysis of morphemes in the short story "The Child's Story" by Charles Dickens".The Child's Story is a short story written by Charles John Huffam Dickens or better known as Charles Dickens.He is a famous English novelist from the reign of Queen Victoria of Great Britain.Charles Dickens was the second child of John Dickens (1786-1851) and Elizabeth Dickens, née Barrow (1789-1863), who was born in Landport, Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812, and died in London June 9, 1870, at the age of 58 years.Charles Dickens achieved worldwide popularity throughout his career, earning a reputation for his excellent storytelling and characters.Charles Dickens is considered one of the most important British writers.Charles Dickens was also the most famous and best novelist of the Victorian era and someone active in social work.
The short story by Charles Dickens entitled "The Child Story" tells the story of a traveller who is on his way everywhere.On the way, he met a beautiful child, a handsome boy, a young man, a middle-aged man, and an older man.Everyone he meets has his favourite activity, and everyone always disappears after completing a training where the traveller is asked to come along with them.
The plot in this short story is relatively simple because the arrangement of the story is chronological.The story begins with an exposition where the narrator tells about a traveller's journey, described as an extraordinary journey.Then the rising action starts when the traveller meets a beautiful child; then he loses her.Actions that escalate, as in the situation when the traveller meets a beautiful child, are repeated in the situation when the traveller meets a handsome boy and a young man.He met each of them, then he teamed up to do each of their favourite things together and ultimately, he lost them.The traveller's meeting with the middle-aged man culminated in the story's climax.The climax begins when the middleaged man loses his three children while they are growing up, and they have decided where they want to go and what they want to achieve in their life.
There are six characters in this short story by Charles Dickens, the main character is the traveller, and the other five characters, which are connected to the main character, determine the storyline.The other five characters are a beautiful child, a handsome boy, a young man, a middle-aged man, and an older man.
The short story "The Child Story" actually symbolises the life of the narrator's grandfather.The traveller's journey represents a phase in the life of the narrator's grandfather.Everyone the traveller encounters reflects every life stage of the narrator's grandfather.The narrator describes the natural beauty around him in such a magnificent way (The sky was so blue, the sun was so bright, the water was so sparkling, the leaves were so green, the flowers were so beautiful, and they heard the birds sing and saw so many butterflies, all beautiful).
The moral of the short story tells us to be always grateful for what we have been through and what we will be going through in our future in our lives.Losing something or someone in our lives is natural because we will be grateful for the lessons learned in the end.We should live gratefully and enjoy every phase of life's journey.The beauty and popularity of this story are why this study took this story as the data.
The issue of inflectional morpheme has become the focus of some researchers.It can be seen from some previous studies conducted by some researchers.Most researchers (Rugaiyah, 2018;Maulidina et al., 2019;Fitria, 2020;Afri & Maulina, 2021) focused on the presentation of derivational and inflectional morphemes.Rugaiyah (2018) analysed the category of derivational and inflectional morphemes in Reading Texts of 2013 Curriculum English Textbook for the X Grade of Senior High Schools Published by the Ministry of Education and Culture.Her study's result shows that most derivational and inflectional morphemes appear in the reading texts.In addition, Maulidina et al. (2019) also conducted research on the presentation of derivational and inflectional morphemes in The Jakarta Post.In line with Rugaiyah's study, their study also states that most derivational and inflectional morphemes appear in the text of The Jakarta Post.Then, Fitria (2020) also conducted research on derivational and inflectional morphemes.Here, she focused on comparing derivational and inflectional morphemes in selected news from Tempo.co.The result shows that inflectional morphemes appeared more dominant than derivational morphemes since they can attach to many words without changing the meaning or class of the word.Afri and Maulina (2021) also conducted research on the presentation of derivational and inflectional morphemes in Adele's album.The result shows that both derivational and inflectional morphemes were found in Adele's album.Here, inflectional morphemes were more dominant than derivational morphemes.
Based on the explanation above, it can be seen that the study of morphemes is very important since they must appear in all kinds of the texts.However, most researchers have focused on the presentation of derivational and inflectional morphemes in some types of the texts.Most of them observed the comparison of derivational and inflectional morphemes in a text, like online news, songs and textbook.In this study, a new focus has been observed to make this study different from the previous ones.This study is only on inflectional morphemes.In addition, the study's data is also different from the previous studies since this research is conducted to observe inflectional morphemes in a short story.

Method
This research employs a qualitative method.In the qualitative method, the researcher is an important part of the research process (Gibbs, 2008).It can be stated that because the researcher should arrange and develop the descriptions and explanations related to the result of the study.This statement is in line with Hammersley (2013), who states that in qualitative, the researcher places more emphasis on generating and developing descriptions and explanations that testing predefines hypotheses like in quantitative.
Furthermore, Hammersley (2013) also explains that qualitative researchers can utilise any documentary data such as official reports, magazines, newspapers, maps, photographs, notes/field notes, and diaries without searching to quantify their content in the manner.Therefore, this research uses document analysis in collecting the data.The document used in this research is a short story taken from the internet entitled "The Child's Story" by Charles Dickens.
In analysing the data, this research uses three steps of qualitative analysis: reducing data, displaying data and making conclusions (Silverman, 2009).In reducing data, unimportant data or information was decreased as long as they did not important to be shown.Then, the table was used to display the data of the study.Finally, in conclusion, the study's result was summarized descriptively.

Finding
Based on the research that has been done, several inflectional morphemes are contained in the short story entitled "A Child's Story" by Charles dickens.To find out more in detail, here is a description of the research result: From the table above, it can be seen that inflectional suffixes consist of 8 suffixes, namely "-s, -er, -est, -ed, -s', -'s, -ing, and -en.
Adding "-s "or "-es" to a noun causes the noun to have a plural meaning.For example in the words " Years, birds, scents, flakes, toys, books, games, trees, paths, roads, cakes, friends, branches, woods, tears, theaters, slippers, turbans, dwarfs, giants, forests, eyes, dimples, palaces, valentines, orsons, chimneys.In addition, adding "-s" to the verb to indicate that the subject is a 3rd person singular.For example in the words "leaves, drops, holidays," Adding "-er" to an adjective or an adverb changes the form to a comparative.The example is in the words "larger and darker".Meanwhile, adding "-est" to an adjective or adverb is to change its form into a superlative.The example is in the words "merriest, earliest, dearest".
Another addition is the addition of "-ed" to the base form of the regular verb to change its form into simple past and past participle.For example in the words of "Traveled, played, loved, liked, called, learned, rowed, skated, danced, laughed, teased, quarreled, engaged, opened, kissed, vanished, stopped, listened, cried, passed, married, welcomed, pleased, honored" The addition of the suffixes "-'s" and "-s'" means to indicate ownership.To show the ownership of a plural noun, we can add the suffix "-s'" and to show the ownership of a singular noun, we can add the suffix "-'s".The example is in the word "child's and prisoners".

Discussion
Related to these results, there are several inflectional morphemes related to the process of forming new words by adding affixes to words that do not change the word class.Other morphemes do not change the meaning or classification of words, but only filter and provide and additional grammatical information about the existing meanings of words.The most common inflectional suffix in Charles Dickens' short story "The Child's Story" is the plural suffix "-s" with 35 findings, and the least is "-en" or past participle suffix with one finding.To find out more clearly about the research results on the short story entitled "The Child's Story" by Charles Dickens, consider the table below.From the table above, it can be seen that the number of inflectional morphemes in the short story by Charles Dickens entitled "The Child's Story" is 108 words.The number of noun plural suffixes (-s) is the most common, with 35 occurrences or 32.5%.Meanwhile, possessive nouns (-'s, -s') and comparative adjectives (-er) appeared two times or 1.8% each.The superlative adjective (-est) also does not appear much in the short story text; the superlative adjective only appears three times, or 2.7%.In addition, another inflectional morpheme, namely 3rd person singular ("-s" present tense), appears four times or 3.7%.Then there is the past tense verb (-ed/-d).The words that contain the past tense verb appear quite often, 29 times or 26.9%.The present participle (-ing) is also one of the most common inflectional morphemes.Present participle words appear 32 times or 29.7%.The last is the past participle verb (-en), which appears the least in the short story.It only appears one time or 0.9%.
The words that contain inflectional morpheme in Charles Dickens' short story are quite a lot (108 words), and mostly, these words appear once.The terms "looking, turning, kissed, friends, tears, and leaves" appear twice and the word "called" occurs four times.Meanwhile, the word that appears most often is "trees", which is a plural noun because it ends in the suffix "-s".This word appears six times.
Based on the data above, we can see that noun plural suffixes (-s) become the most dominant inflectional morpheme in this text.This result is in line with the studies of Maulidina et al. (2019) and Fitria (2020), who mentioned that inflectional morphemes especially noun plural suffixes, becomes the most dominant inflectional morphemes among other types.It can occur because plural suffixes (-s) as inflectional morphemes attached to many nouns in the text.

Conclusion
Based on the results and discussion above, inflectional morphemes are used quite a lot in the short story entitled "The Child's Story" by Charles Dickens.It is stated that 108 words use inflectional morphemes.Plural nouns that use the suffix "-s" or "-es" are the most, with a 32.5% percentage.Meanwhile, Each of the possessive nouns "-'s", "-s'" and comparative adjectives "-er" appears two times or with a percentage of 1.8%.The percentage of adjective superlative "-est" and 3rd person singular/present tense "-s" is also not too much, namely 2.7% and 3.7%.Present participle "-ing" and verb past tense "-ed/-d" appear quite a lot in this short story; their percentages are 29.7% and 26.9%.The one that appears the least is the past participle verb (uses the suffix "-en").It only appears once or with a percentage of 0.9%.
Inflectional morphemes are affixed to other words that change the grammar of the words.Inflectional morphemes do not produce new meanings even though the form of words differs from the previous words.Inflectional morphemes include superlatives and comparatives "est", "er", forming V2 and V3 "ed", "en", making plurals "s", "es", verbs in the 3rd person singular "s", "es" and present participle "-ing." It seems that inflectional morphemes appearing in the short story "The Child's Story" by Charles Dickens can positively influence the readers' skills, especially those related to morphology.Learning morphology is very important to know how a word is formed.Learning inflectional morphemes becomes one of the materials that the language learners must master.In this study, the data were only focused on inflectional morphemes.For future researchers, it is suggested to analyse any other kind of texts which many people commonly read.
).In English, aspects and voices are expressed by a blend of auxiliary choice and choice of participles.The progressive tense, which states, among other things or action in progress, is established with the auxiliary "be" plus present participle(Lieber, 2009: 100).

Table 1 .
Inflectional suffixes in "The Child's Story" by Charles Dickens

Table 2 :
Inflectional Morphemes in Short Story "The Child's Story" by Charles Dickens