ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 32: Concept: Affixes Affixes are morphemes, aka. the basic
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 32: Concept: Affixes Affixes are morphemes, aka. the basic building blocks of words, that cannot form a full word on their own and must therefore affix themselves to another morpheme. Most of you are likely familiar with prefixes, which affix to the start of a word, and suffixes, which affix to the end. However there are two other kinds of commonly accepted affixes: infixes and circumfixes. Infixes go, as the name implies, in the middle of a word. We actually have infixes in English: curse words. Think of phrases like “abso-fuckin-lutely” or “ri-goddamn-diculous”. Incidentally these are not random insertions; the infix must always go before the primarily stressed syllable (you can’t say “absolut-fuckin-ly” or “ridic-goddamn-ulous”). A clever reader may note that this is rather contrary to the definition I gave at the start: curse words can stand on their own. The honest truth is the strict definition of affix is more complex than I thought would be wise to start off with, so I went with a general approximation. Forgive me. Circumfixes go around words. Malay is well know for this, though anyone who has taken German has technically encountered one: any German past tense that starts “ge-” and ends in “-t” (or a similar ending) has been circumfixed. It should be noted that this is not the same as having both a prefix and a suffux. The English word “unusable” has two affixes, three morphemes total “un-”, “use” and “-able”. You can remove the “un-” and still have a word. Interestingly enough you can’t remove just the “-able”. Why? You’ll have to wait for my post on inflection and derivation. C: -- source link