17. 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. act in act, actor, active, action; theor in 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 prefixes which precede the root (unhappy, rewrite, discover, impossible, misbehaviour) and suffixes which 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 that contain 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.

- 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:

a context vs. an index [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).

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.

The difference between inflection and derivation

Inflection is a general grammatical process which combines words and affixes (always suffixes in English) to produce alternative grammatical forms of words (e.g., the addition of the inflexion -er to the adjective cold gives colder), which is not a different lexical item, but an inflectional variant of the same word. One of the most important characteristics of inflectional suffixes is that they tend to lend themselves to paradigms which apply to the language as a whole [Jackson 2001:71]. The paradigm of a major word class consists of a single stem of that class with the inflexional suffixes which the stem may take.

Finally, under inflections, the distinction between “regular” and “irregular” inflections needs to be pointed out. Regular inflections are those that are formed according to a common pattern, e.g. –s for the plural of nouns. Irregular inflections are those that do not follow this pattern, e.g. some nouns form their plurals irregularly: child – children, mouse – mice, tooth – teeth.

As for derivation, it is a lexical process which actually forms a new word out of an existing one by the addition of a derivational affix. For example, the suffixes -dom and -ful may be added to the adjective free and the noun hope respectively to derive the noun freedom and the adjective hopeful, which again are different words. Following H.Jackson [2001:70] it may be said that strictly speaking, the term “derivation” refers to the creation of a new word by means of the addition of an affix to a stem.

English has over sixty common derivational affixes, and there is no theoretical limit to their number. Derivations have a “low functional load”, in the sense that each single derivation occurs rarely and is limited to a few specific combinations with particular stems. In other words, they tend not to be paradigms which apply to sets of words as a whole.

Derivational affixes do not always cause a change in grammatical class, e.g. intelligent/unintelligent, probable/improbable, but sometimes they can change the word class of the item they are added to and establish words as member of the various classes. They are inner with respect to inflections, so that if derivations and inflections co-occur, derivations are inner, closer to the stem, and inflections are outer, furthest from the stem, as shown in the table below [Jackson 2001:74].

Derivational affixes are of such kinds: class-changing and class-maintaining. Class changing derivational affixes change the word class of the word to which they are added. They, resign, a verb + -ation gives resignation, a noun. Class – maintaining derivational affixes do not change the word class of the word, but change the meaning of the derivative (i/e/ a word which results from the derivation). Thus child, a noun + -hood gives childhood, still a noun, but now an abstract rather than a concrete noun.

Class-changing derivational affixes, once added to a stem, form a derivative which is automatically marked by that affix as noun, verb, adjective or adverb. The derivations are said to determine or govern the word class of the stem as will be shown below, English class-changing derivations are mainly suffixes.

Noun derivational affixes “nominalizers” , e.g.

Verb derivational affixes, also known as “verbalizers”, are used to form verbs from other stems. When compared with other derivational affixes, they are rather rare, because verbs are the most basic forms in English: while they are used to derive other words, they themselves are not readily derived from other forms.

Adjective derivational affixes or “adjectivizers” are used to form adjectives when added to a given stem. In English, adjectives are generally formed from nouns, more rarely from verbs [Jackson 2001:77]

Adverb derivational affixes or “adverbializers” are affixes which form adverbs when added to a given stem. Adverbs, in English, are generally formed from adjectives, sometimes from nouns.

Class-maintaining derivations refer to those derivations which do not change the word class of the stem to which they are added although they do change its meaning. Unlike class-changing derivations, which are mainly suffixes, English class-maintaining derivations are mainly prefixes.

According to Prof.Amosova suffixes are used not only to form new words but also to mark parts of speech. Accordingly they are subdivided into noun-forming suffixes, verb-forming suffixes, adjective and adverb-forming suffixes.