Word-building. Affixation: prefixes, their classification; suffixes, their classification; productive and unproductive affixes.
- From the structural point of view, words may be divisible into smaller units which are called morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units which may constitute words or parts of words. They are “smallest” or “minimal” in the sense that they cannot be broken down further on the basis of meaning: “morphemes are the atoms which words are built” [Jackson 2001:2]. From the semantic point of view all morphemes are subdivided into 2 large classes: root morphemes(roots) and affixational morphemes(affixes) [Квеселевич 2000:16]. The root is known to the lexical nucleus of a word. It is common to a set of words that make up a lexical word cluster, e.g. actin act, actor, active, action; theorin theory, theorist, theoretician, theoretical, etc. There exist many roots that coincide with root-words, e.g. son, desk, see, look.
Affixational morphemes include inflectional affixes or inflections and derivational affixes. Inflections carry only grammatical meaning and are thus relevant only for formation of word-forms, whereas derivational affixes are relevant for building various types of words. Lexicology, as has been mentioned, is concerned only with derivational affixes which are lexically always dependent on the root which they modify.
- So, the affixes, in their turn, fall into prefixeswhich precede the root (unhappy, rewrite, discover, impossible, misbehaviour) and suffixeswhich follow the root (worker, friendship, peaceful).
The part of a word which remains unchanged in all the forms of its paradigm is called a stem, e.g. girl- in girls, girl’s, girls; darken- in darkens, darkened, darkening. Stems that coincide with roots are known as simple stems, e.g. boys, trees, read, stems thatcontain one or more affixes are derived stems, e.g. teacher’s, governments, etc. Binary stems comprising two simple or derived stems are called compound stems, e.g. machine-gunner’s, ex-film-star, gentlemanly, etc.
- From the structural point of view morphemes fall into 3 types: free morphemes, bound morphemes, and semi-bound morphemes. A free morpheme can occur alone as individual words, e.g. friendly, friendship (a friend). Bound morphemes occur only as constituent parts of words, i.e. can occur only with another morpheme, e.g. freedom, greatly, depart, enlarge, dishonest, misprint, conceive, receive, etc. Semi-bound morphemes can function both as affixes and as free morphemes (i.e. words). Let’s compare after, half, man, well, self and after-thought, half-baked, chairman, well-known, himself.
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- While discussing the basic unit of morphology any concrete realization of a morpheme in a given utterance must be pointed out that is called a “morph”. Morphs shouldn’t be confused with syllables as the basic difference between them is that while morphs are manifestations of morphemes and represent a specific meaning, syllables are parts of words which are isolated only on the basis of pronunciation [Jackson 2001:3].
Two or more morphs may vary slightly and still have the same meaning, e.g. the indefinite article may be realized either as a or an, depending on the sound at the beginning of the following word. Morphs which are different representation of the same morpheme are referred to as “allomorphs” of that morpheme (from Greek allo “other” and morph “form”). For example:
acontext vs. anindex [Jackson 2001:3].
Prof. Kveselevich interprets allomorphs as positional variants of a morpheme [2001:16]. Thus the prefix in- (intransitive, involuntary) can be represented by allomorph il- (illegal, illiteracy), im- (immortal, impatience), ir- (irregular, irresolute).
English words fall into four main structural types:
1) compound words (compounds) in which two or more stems are combined into a lexical unit, e.g. classroom, forget-me-not, salesgirl, blacklist, speedometer;
2) derivational compounds in which phrase components are joined together by means of compounding and affixation, e.g. long-legged, black-eyed, oval-shaped, bald-headed, strong-willed, etc.
- Word-formation is the process of creating new words from the material available in the word stock according to certain structural and semantic patterns specific for the given language [Kveselevich 2001:21].
Each word-formation process will result in the production of a specific type of word. Consequently, an understanding of these processes is one way of studying the different types of word that exist in English. Various types of word-formation in Modern English possess different degrees of productivity. Productivity – is the relative freedom with which speakers coin new forms by it. Some of them are highly-productive(affixation, conversion, compounding, shortening, forming, phrasal verbs); others are semi-productive (back-formation, blending, reduplication, lexicalization of the plural of nouns, sound-imitation) and non-productive (sound interchange, change of stress).
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Lexicologists agree that the most productive word-formation process in English is Affixation in which words are created by adding word-building affixes to stems [Kveselevich 2001:21]. The role of the affix in this procedure is very important and therefore it is necessary to consider certain facts about the main types of affixes [Antrushina 2001:80]. From the etymological point of view affixes are classified according to their origin into native (e.g. -er, -ness, -ing, un-, mis-, etc) and borrowed (Romanic, e.g. -tion, -ment, -ance, re-, sub-, etc.; Greek, e.g. -ist, -ism, anti-, etc.). Prof. Antrushina classified affixes into productive and non-productive types (p.81). By productive affixes the ones are meant which take part in deriving new words in the particular period of language development, e.g. - productive affixes: noun-forming – er, ing, ness, ism, adjective-forming – y, ish, ed, able, less, adverb-forming – y, verb-forming – ize/ise, ate
- non-productive: noun-forming – th, hood, adjective-forming – ly, some, en, ous, verb-forming – en.
Affixation includes prefixation, i.e. forming new words wish the help of prefixes, and suffixation, i.e. forming new words with the help of suffixes. Let’s consider the details of the above mentioned processes.
From the etymological point of view prefixes in the English language are mostly Germanic or Latin [Паращук 1999:49]. The list of all common prefixes in English [Crystal p.128], where some of them appear more than once because they have more than one meaning
- Suffixation: -tion, -ship, -ness, -able, -ery, -ese, -ling, -like, -let, -esque, -ette, -ess, -ism, -ite, ‑ish, are some of the commonly occurring English suffixes. A number of them have a meaning which is fairly eary to state: -ess, e.g., means “female of” (lioness). Some have several meanings: ette can mean “female of” (usherette), “small version of” (kitchenette), or “substitute for” (leatherette). Some have a highly abstract meaning, difficult to define precisely: one of the meanings of -ery is “the quality or state of having a particular trait” (snobbery). Suffixes do more than alter the meaning of the word to which they are attached. Many of them also change the word’s grammatical status – for example, the -ify ending turns the noun beauty into the verb beautify, and the ending -ing turns the concrete noun farm into the abstract one farming. In this respect, suffixes differ from prefixes, which rarely cause words to change their class.
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