Affixational (affixes)

Classification

1.

A great number of words in English are of compositive nature and are made up of smaller unites (morphemes – help-less-ness).

It’s important to see the difference between a word and a morpheme.

A word is autonomous unit of a language in which a particular meaning is associated with a particular sound complex and which is capable of a particular grammatical employment and able to form a sentense itself.

Like a word a morpheme id also association of certain meaning and sound pattern; but unlike a word, a morpheme isn’t an autonomous unit and can occur ib speech only as a constituent part of a word; not independently.

Morphemes can’t be divided into smaller meaningful units.

That’s why a morpheme may be defined as the smallest meaningful language unit of form.

Semantically all morphemes are subdivided into:

1) root morphemes – they’re lexical centers of the words, they’re basic constituent parts: london er, black ness

In English the root is very often homonymous with words (play, head, wind)

They are subdivided into prefixes and suffixes. They have a generalized meaning (lexical) and the part-of-speech meaning. E.g. suffixes –er; -ee denote a doer of an action, noun-forming.

Structurally morphemes are divided into: free, bound and semi-bound (semi-free).

Free – a form may stand alone without changing its meaning

Bound – a form cannot occur in speech alone. E.g. all the affixes

Semi-bound – they can function both as an affix and as a free morpheme. E.g. thing – anything, like – womanlike, well – well-done.

Prefixes and suffixes are derivational morphemes. They are used to form new words. Words, which consist of a root and prefix or a suffix (or both), are called derived words (производные) or derivatives.

When a derivational affix is stripped from a word what remains is a stem. If a stem is a single morpheme and contains nothing but a root, it’s a simple stem.

If a stem consists of a root morpheme and an affix, it’s not simple but derived stem.

E.g. heart-i-er – derived stem

hearty – simple stem

Word-formation is the process of creating new words from the material of a language after certain structural and semantic fomulars and patterns.

Word-building is one of the main ways of enriching vocabulary.

There are four main ways of word-building in Modern English: affixation, composition, conversion, shortening.

There are also secondary ways of word-building: soundinterchange, stress interchange, sound imitation, blends, back formation (disaffixation).

Sound-interchange is the way of word-building when some sounds are changed to form a new word, e.g. to strike – stroke, to sing – song.

Stress interchange can be mostly met in verbs and nouns of Romanic origin: nouns have the stress on the first syllable and verbs on the last syllable, e.g. accent – to accent.

Sound imitation is the way of word-building when a word is built by imitating different sounds:

a) sounds produced by human beings: to whisper, to mumble;

b) sounds produced by animals, birds, insects: to moo, to hiss, to buzz;

c) sounds produced by nature and objects: to splash, to bubble, to clatter.

Blends are words formed from a word-group or two synonyms, e.g. hustle (hurry and bustle), cinemaddict (cinema addict).

Backformation (disaffixation) is the way of word-building when a word is formed by dropping the final morpheme to form a new word, e.g. to bach (from bachelor), to televise (from television). The part-of-speech meaning of the primary word is changed, verbs are formed from nouns.

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