Which pair shows a word and its inflected form using a standard inflectional morpheme?

Which pair shows a word and its inflected form using a standard inflectional morpheme?

• A. cat - cat
• B. cat - cats
• C. cat - catted
• D. cat - dogs

Answer: (B)

Inflectional morphemes add grammatical information to a word without changing its basic category. The standard inflectional suffix for making a noun plural is -s. The pair cat and cats shows this clearly: adding -s to the base cat forms the plural cats. The other options don’t illustrate the same word receiving a standard inflection: cat with cat shows no inflection; cat with catted uses -ed in a way that would mark past tense for a verb (which isn’t the base here); and cat with dogs pairs the base with a different word, not an inflected form of the same word.

Inflectional morphemes add grammatical information to a word without changing its basic category. The standard inflectional suffix for making a noun plural is -s. The pair cat and cats shows this clearly: adding -s to the base cat forms the plural cats. The other options don’t illustrate the same word receiving a standard inflection: cat with cat shows no inflection; cat with catted uses -ed in a way that would mark past tense for a verb (which isn’t the base here); and cat with dogs pairs the base with a different word, not an inflected form of the same word.