We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Most of the content words of English can change their form by adding prefixes or suffixes. These affixes are typically divided into two types – inflectional and derivational. The inflectional affixes in English are all suffixes. They include -s (plural), -ed, -ing, -s (3rd person singular), -s (possessive), -er (comparative), -est (superlative). Unlike most derivational suffixes, inflections do not change the part of speech of the word or word group they are attached to, and are added after a derivational suffix if the word has one.
Derivational affixes in English include prefixes and suffixes. Most of the derivational suffixes and a few prefixes change the part of speech of the word they are added to – for example, happy (adjective)/happiness (noun); able (adjective)/enable (verb). Some of the affixes, especially preixes, also alter the meaning of the word in a substantial way – for example, judge/prejudge; happy/unhappy; care/careless. Words which contain affixes are sometimes called complex words.
There are two kinds of word stems, those which can stand as a word in their own right – help/helpless – and are called free forms, and those which cannot stand as a word in their own right without an affix (bound forms) -clude as in preclude, include. In general, bound stems are best learned as mnemonic items for particular words, that is, if you know that -clude means ‘close’ this may help you remember the meaning of exclude and perhaps include.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
