PREFIXES

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 365.

AFIXES

ROOTS

ROOTS, AFFIXES, STEMS AND BASES

TYPES OF MORPHOLOGY

A root is the irreducible core of a Word, with absolutely nothing else attached to it. It is the part that is always present, possibly with some modification, in the various manifestations of a lexeme. For example, walk is a root and it a appears in the set of word-forms that instantiate the lexeme WALK such as walk, walks, walking and walked.

The only situation where this is not true is when suppletion takes place. In that case, word-forms that represent the same morpheme do not share a common root morpheme. Thus, although both the word –forms good and better realise the lexeme GOOD, only good is phonetically similar to GOOD.

Many words contain a root standing on its own. Roots which are capable of standing independently are called free morphemes, for example:

Free morphemes

• Man book tea sweet cook
• Bet very aardvark pain walk

An affix is a morpheme which only occurs when attached to some other morpheme such as a root or stem or base. Obviously, by definition affixes are bound morphemes. No word may contain only an affix standing on its own, like *-s or * -al or even a number of affixes strung together like *-al-s.

There are three types of affixes. We will consider them in turn.

A prefix is an affix attached before a root or stem or base like re-, un- and in-.

• Re-make un-kind in-decnt
• Re-read un-tidy in-accurate