Word formation in English: affixation

 

Word formation in English

English is a modern, rich in vocabulary and versatile language and that is due to the great capacity of different manners to enlarge the English lexicon by means of creation, assimilation, borrowing, etc. of new words. There are many types of word formation, such as derivation, borrowing, coinage, blending, calques, neologism, acronyms, clipping and abbreviations, reduplication, back-formation, though the most important are derivation, conversion and compounding.

Affixation: It is another type of derivation in which we form a new word without the change of the root or stem of the word but adding prefix, suffix or infix ( a bound morpheme).

Prefixes: a new word can be formed if added a prefix at the beginning of a word, they usually come from Latin, Greek or Germanic words.

Suffixes: A new word is formed whenever we add any of these derivational suffixes at the end of the word.

 

SUFFIX	MEANING	EXAMPLES
-ly	like	angrily, beautifully, sadly
-able	to have the ability, quality	reliable, eatable, lovable
-er	person doing an action	player, runner, footballer
-ful	with a quality or full of	useful, sinful, joyful
-ment	result of	acknowledgement, judgement, advertisement
-less	negation, lack of	useless, endless, careless
-ous	with a quality	disastrous, fabulous, adventurous, enormous
-tion	to carry out	ambition, pollution, position, revolution
-ness	like	kindness, fitness, illness
-age	result of	cage, page, image, rage

 

Moreover there are other types of suffixes which just provide information about the number (-s, -es), person (adding the -s or -es at the end of verb in the 3 person singular), possession (saxon genitive ´s at the end of the possessor), tense and grade of the adjective (-ed for Past, -en in some Participle or Gerund -ing) or adverb in superior comparatives (-er in short adjectives) and superlatives (-est).