Word-Building

In English there exist four main ways and seven secondary ways of word-building. The four main ways are:

ü conversion,

ü derivation,

ü composition,

ü shortening.

The seven secondary ways of word-building in English are:

ü sound interchange,

ü stress interchange,

ü sound imitation,

ü reduplication,

ü blending(contamination),

ü back formation,

ü redistribution.

Morpheme

Each word consists of morphemes. It is not an independent sense unit as a word or a sentence are, it is always used as a part of a word. There exist four types of morphemes.

The root expresses the lexical meaning of a word.

Affixes modify the meaning of the root. Affixes are divided into prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes stand before the stem, suffixes stand after the stem.

Prefixes modify the lexical meaning of the root (e.g. just- unjust).

Suffixes form a new part of speech: e.g. beauty n. – beautiful adj. Forming a new part of speech is the main function of suffixes.

Inflexions build new grammatical forms of the same word: pen – pens (singular/plural). Building new grammatical forms is the main function of inflexions.

The stem is the part of the word to which the latest affix is added: e.g. active = act (root/stem) +-ive (suffix), activity = activ (stem) + -ity (suffix).

Stems have part of speech characteristics, i.e. they belong to parts of speech, e.g. active – act (verb stem), beautiful – beauti (noun stem). Stems can be bound and free. The bound stem cannot be used as an independent word in the language (e.g. Irish = Ir (stem) + -ish (suffix)), the free stem can be used as an independent word in the language (e.g. childish = child (stem) + -ish suffix)).

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