Here are my thoughts on your follow-up questions:
1. Why do you say that “there are only three word forms that will strictly meet this definition—the word’s base form, its singular form, and its plural form.” After your explanations on verbs, I would say that a noun has two forms – the base form (which can also function as a singular form) and its plural form. Why is it wrong?
I said that there are only three word forms that will strictly meet the term’s definition as “the phonological manifestation (sound) or orthographic appearance (spelling) of a word that can be used to describe or identify something.” In the case of nouns, they have indeed a maximum of three, not two, such word forms—the word’s base form, its singular form, and its plural form.
As an example, take the noun that has “ax” as its base form, “axe” as a spelling variant in singular form, and “axes” as its plural form. Another example is the noun “patty,” which in its lower case form means “a little pie” or “a small flat candy”; its plural form is, of course, “patties.” However, when the first letter of the singular form is capitalized so the base word reads as “Patty,” it could stand as the proper name of a girl or woman. It’s to take account of a third variation like this that I said a noun can have three word forms that sound and spell more or less the same.
2. I think that I understood the difference between the base form and a dictionary form, but is it correct to say that “lexeme” is another thing, too? That is, can we say that with a verb we have a set of basic forms (including the base form), the dictionary form, and the lexeme?
By definition, a “lexeme” is a unit of lexical meaning, which exists regardless of any inflectional endings it may have or the number of words it may contain. It may just be a single word (“believing,” “accordingly”) or it may consist of more than one word; in fact, they can be noun phrases (“national airline,” “preponderance of evidence,” “lakeshore town”), verb phrases (“will be coming over,” “have seen it all”), phrasal verbs (“come up,” “step up to plate”), or any set of words that denotes a specific meaning. In the case of a noun, say “ax,” the base form (“ax”), dictionary form (“ax”), plural form (“axes”), and recognized variant (“axe”) are all forms of the lexeme “ax”; and in the case of a verb, say “go,” its base form (“go”), its inflections and conjugations for tense (“go,” “went,” “going,” “gone”), its infinitive form (“to go”), its gerund form (“going”), and its participle form (“gone”) are all forms of the same lexeme “go.”
Based on this nature of the lexeme, it will be imprecise to say as you suggested “that with a verb, we have a set of basic forms (including the base form), the dictionary form, and the lexeme.” The precise way to say it is that the basic form of the verb itself is the lexeme and all its inflections and conjugations as well as its nonfinite forms are different forms of that lexeme.
3. I am definitely perplexed with inflections. You say that “has worked,” “have worked,” etc. can be regarded as inflections. But it seems that some books think that an inflection is the name only for the extra letter or letters added to a word. Can we say that we have different notions of the word “inflection”?
In my previous posting, I qualified as a nonspecialist view my assertion that I didn’t think that the multifarious inflections of the verb “work” can be legitimately called “word forms” of the base verb “work.” Looking back, I can see now that I should have used the more precise term “multifarious tense forms of the verb” instead of “multifarious inflections of the verb” to make the term truly inclusive of the simple inflections for tense of the verb “work” (“works,” “worked,” “working”) and those that require adding auxiliary verbs to form the perfect tenses (“has worked,” “have worked,” “have been working,” “will have worked,” “would have worked”), or adding a function word (“to”) to form its infinitive (“to work”). I'm sorry for not having made that qualification. It could have spared you from your perplexity as you tried to reconcile the nonspecialist view that I offered with the view of some grammar books “that an inflection is the name only for the extra letter or letters added to a word.”
In any case, let me just clarify that the grammar-book definition of “inflection” that you cited is itself an oversimplification, for it definitely fails to account for the inflection of quite a number of irregular verbs in English that, rather than just add an extra letter or letters to the verb, use entirely new or vastly different words. Cases in point are the inflections of “be,” namely “is,” “are,” “were,” “being,” and “been”; of “go,” namely “going,” “went,” and “gone”; of “lie,” namely “lay,” “lying,”and “lain”; and of “see,” namely “saw,” “seeing,” and “seen.” Indeed, because English has acquired so many words from entirely different languages, trying to make generalizations on the workings and inflections of its words—particularly verbs—can sometimes be frustrated by glaring exceptions.
4. As for the idea that “tenses should be morphological ones only,” I’ve found some grammar books where they try to explain it.
For example, Michael Lewis in his ‘The English verb” writes that ‘…tense is a technical term. It means that there is a morphological change in the base form of the verb. A verb form which is made with an auxiliary is not, in this technical meaning, a “tense”. In this technical sense, the, English verbs have only two tenses…’
Longman grammar: From a structural point of view, English verbs are inflected for only two tenses – present and past.
‘The grammar book’: … the system is selective because tense, in the morphological sense, refers only to the inflections one can use with finite (i.e. inflectionable) verbs. Given this perspective, English has only two tense forms – past and present.
I wouldn’t say that such explanations are clear for me…
Again, from a nonspecialist point of view, I really see no practical learning value in such expert assertions as “tenses should be morphological ones only” and “English has only two tense forms – past and present.” Such statements may be useful to studies in comparative linguistics, but I dare say that they just tend to fly in the face of actual usage, thus sowing confusion rather than adding clarity and light to a learner’s efforts to make sense and make proper use of the English tenses.
So, for practical applications in written and spoken English, I would suggest sticking to the conventional count of three main tenses with four sub-tenses each for a total 12 tenses in all, as follows:
PRESENT TENSE:
Simple Present: “He laughs.”
Present Perfect: “He has laughed.”
Present Continuous: “He is laughing.”
Present Perfect Continuous: “He has been laughing.”
PAST TENSE:
Simple Past: “He laughed.”
Past Perfect: “He had laughed.”
Past Continuous: “He was laughing.”
Past Perfect Continuous: “He had been laughing.”
FUTURE TENSE:
Simple Future: “He will laugh.”
Future Continuous: “He will be laughing.”
Future Perfect: “He will have laughed.”
Future Perfect Continuous: “He will have been laughing.”
Think of these 12—not 2 or any other number—when you want to construct a sentence in English. I can assure you that anyone can achieve mastery of English and its tenses much faster by going for its jugular rather than by beating the bush around it.
5. P.S. When I was writing “That is, it is clear for me that ‘worker’ is a form of the word ‘work,’” I had in mind something like “it is clear for me that ‘houses’ is a form of the word ‘house.’” I don’t know why I wrote such a stupid thing instead.
Well, Ivan, everyone makes a mistake sometime. Once corrected, it’s better not to dwell on it.
