Semi-affixes

There is a specific group of morphemes whose derivational function does not allow one to refer them unhesitatingly either to derivational affixes or to bases. In words like half-done, half-broken, half-eaten; ill-fed, ill-housed the ICs ill-and half — are losing their semantic and structural identity with the stems of the independent words. Ill — and half— have acquired a generalized meaning of incompleteness and poor quality in contrast to the individual meaning proper to the stems of independent words (ill: to speak ill of smb; half: half an hour ago).

Thus ill- and half- in ill-fed and half-done function more as affixational morphemes similar to the prefixes out-, over-, under-, semi-, mis-, regularly forming whole classes of words. Yet these morphemes retain certain lexical ties with the root-morphemes in the stems of independent words, and that is why they are felt as occupying an intermediate position, i.e. semi-affixes. Other examples of semi-affixes are man in postman, cabman; self — in self-made.

Derivational patterns

A derivational pattern is a regular meaningful arrangement, a structure that imposes rigid rules on the order and the nature of the derivational bases and affixes that may be brought together. A pattern is a generalization, a scheme indicative of 1) the type of ICs, 2) their order and 3) arrangement which signals 1) the part of speech, 2) the structural and 3) semantic peculiarities common to all the individual words for which the pattern holds true. Hence the derivational patterns (DP) may be viewed as classifiers of non-simple words into structural types and within them into semantic sets and subsets. DPs are studied with the help of distributional analysis at different levels. Patterns are usually represented in terms of conventional symbols: small letters v, n, a, d, num stand for the bases which coincide with the stems of the respective parts of speech: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, numerals; v_ed, v_lng stand for the bases which are the past and present participles respectively.

In the word long-fingered the derivational pattern is represented by bracketed symbols of the parts of speech making up the corresponding collocation, i.e. [(a + n) + _:ed)]. DPs may represent derivative structure at different levels of generalization: a) at the level of structural types specifying only the class membership of ICs and the direction of motivation, such as a + -sf -> N, prf— + n ->. V, prf- + n -» N, n + -sf ->N, n +- sf -» V,V ->N.

In terms of patterns of this type, known as structural formulas, all words may be classified into four classes:

1. suffixal derivatives, e.g. friendship, blackness;

2. prefixal derivatives, e.g. rewrite, unhappy;

3) conversions, e.g. a cut; to parrot;

4) compound words, e.g. music-lover, wind-driven. However, these structural formulas are not indicative either of lexical-grammatical or lexical classes of words, e.g., the formula a + -sf may equally represent suffixal nouns (blackness, possibility) and suffixal verbs (sharpen), or adjectives (blackish);- -

b) derivative structure of words may be represented at the level of structural — semantic types, which specify the base classes and individual affixes. E.g. a + -ness —»N.

It follows that derivational patterns may be classified into two types — structural patterns and structural-semantic patterns.