6. Boundary cases between derivation, inflection and composition.

It will be helpful now to remember that the vocabulary is a constantly changing adaptive sys­tem, the subsets of which have blurred boundaries.

There are cases, indeed, where it is very difficult to draw a hard and fast line between roots and affixes on the one hand, and derivational af­fixes and inflectional formatives on the other. The distinction between these has caused much discussion and is no easy matter altogether.

There are a few roots in English which have developed great combin­ing ability in the position of the second element of a word and a very general meaning similar to that of an affix. These are semi-affixes. They receive this name because semantically, functionally, structurally and statistically they behave more like affixes than like roots. Their meaning is as general. They determine the lexico-grammatical class the word belongs to. Cf. sailor : : seaman, where -or is a suffix, and functionally similar, -man is a semi-affix. Another specific group is formed by the adverb-forming suffix -ly, following adjective stems, and the noun-forming suffixes -ing, -ness, -er, and by -ed added to a combination of two stems: faint-hearted, long-legged. By their almost unlimited combining possibilities (high valency) and the almost complete fusion of lexical and lexico-grammatical mean­ing they resemble inflectional formatives. The derivation with these suffixes is so regular and the meaning and function of the derivatives so obvious that such derivatives are very often considered not worth an entry in the dictionary and therefore omitted as self-evident. Almost every adjective stem can produce an adverb with the help of -ly, and an abstract noun by taking up the suffix -ness. Every verbal stem can prod­uce the name of the doer by adding -er, and the name of the process or its result by adding -ing. A suffix approaching those in productivity is -ish denoting a moderate degree of the quality named in the stem. There­fore these words are explained in dictionaries by referring the reader to the underlying stem. For example, in "The Concise Oxford Dictionary" we read: "womanliness — the quality of being womanly; womanized a or past participle in senses of the verb; womanishly — in a womanish manner; womanishness — the quality or state of being womanish".

These affixes are remarkable for their high valency also in the for­mation of compound derivatives corresponding to free phrases: every day :: everydayness.

Other borderline cases also present considerable difficulties for clas­sification. It is indeed not easy to draw the line between derivatives and compound words or between derivatives and root words. Such mor­phemes expressing relationships in space and time as after-, in- (Not to be mixed with the bound form in-/ im-/ il-/ ir- expressing negation.), off-, on-, out-, over-, under-, with- and the like which may occur as free forms have a combining power at least equal and sometimes even superior to that of the affixes. Their function and meaning as well as their position are exactly similar to those characteristic of prefixes. They modify the respective stems for time, place or manner exactly as prefixes do. They also are similar to prefixes in their statistical properties of frequency. And yet prefixes are bound forms by definition, whereas these forms are free. This accounts for the different treatment they receive in different dictionaries. Thus, Chambers's Dictionary considers aftergrowth a deri­vation with the prefix after-, while similar formations like afternoon, afterglow or afterthought are classified as compound nouns. Webster's Dictionary does not consider after- as a prefix at all. COD alongside with the preposition and the adverb on gives a prefix on- with the examples: oncoming, onflow, onlooker, whereas in Chambers's Dictionary oncome is treated as a compound.

The other difficulty concerns borrowed morphemes that were never active as prefixes in English but are recognized as such on the analogy with other words also borrowed from the same source. A strong protest against this interpretation was expressed by N.N.Amosova. In her opinion there is a very considerable confusion in English linguistic litera­ture concerning the problem of the part played by foreign affixes in Eng­lish word-building. This author lays particular stress on the distinction between morphemes that can be separated from the rest of the stem and those that cannot. Among the latter she mentions the following prefixes listed by H. Sweet: amphi-, ana-, apo-, cata-, exo-, en-, hypo-, meta-, sina- (Greek) and ab; ad-, amb- (Latin). The list is rather a mixed one. Thus, amphi- is even productive in terminology and is with good reason considered by dictionaries a combining form. Ana- in such words as anachronism, anagram, anaphora is easily distinguished, because the words readily lend themselves for analysis into immediate constituents. The prefix ad- derived from Latin differs very much from these two, being in fact quite a cluster of allomorphs assimilated with the first sound of the stem: ad-/ac-/af-/ag-/al-/ap-/as-/at-. E. g. adapt, accumulation, affirm, aggravation, etc.