Derivational and functional affixes

Functional affixes serve to convey grammatical meaning, because they create different forms of the same word. An example can be found in any grammatical paradigm, e.g. near [zero affix], nearer [-er- affix], nearest [-est- affix]. Son [zero], sons [-s-], son’s [-‘s], sons’ [-s’].

Derivational affixes are used to supply the stem with components of lexical and lexico-grammatical meaning. Derivational affixes, unlike functional ones, create different words representing different parts of speech. E.g. stone, stony. However, one and the same affix may have one grammatical meaning, but different lexical ones, e.g. “-y-“: cloudy means full of something (e.g. clouds), stony means heaving the quality of or composed of some material (stone), baggy means resembling something (bag), hairy means covered with something (hair), bossy means boss + emotional component.

The above said two types of affixes differ not only semantically, but also positionally, thus a functional affix marks the word boundary, as it may only follow the root or the affix of derivation in the stem. A functional affix may only come last in the word and make any further derivation of that word completely impossible. That is why Eugen Nider calls functional affixes outerformatives, while derivational affixes are called by him innerformatives.

Another problem is that of valency of affixes and the derivational patterns in which the affixes occur. A good example is negative prefixes. We have vocabularly fixed forms unhappy, untrue, unattractive, though similar *unsad, *unfalse, *unpretty do not exist.

The possibility of a particular stem to take a particular affix may also depend on such outer factors as the formal morphological structure of the given word. E.g. the suffix “-ance-/-ence-” may only occur after letters b, t, d, v, l, r: disturbance, insistance, independence, etc. But this suffix can never occur after z or s: condensation, organization, etc.

The whole system of valency of morphemes is a complex problem which should be studied separately and given special concern. The term a word-building patter or a derivational patter denotes a meaningful combination of stems and affixes which regularly occur to indicate:

1. the part of speech,

2. the lexico-semantic category,

3. the semantic peculiarities, which are common to most words with this or that particular arrangement of morphemes.

Thus all the words with the negative prefix “un-“ form the following four patterns:

1. un­ + adjective/part.I/part.II meaning “not” without the opposite of something (unhuman)

2. un + verbal stem meaning to reverse the action (to unpack, to unbend)

3. un + verbal stem derived from a noun stem meaning to release from something (to unhook, to unlock)

4. un + noun stem meaning the lack of some quality (unpeople)

The last pattern is comparatively rare in modern English.

Affixes can be classified according to their origin, the part of speech they serve, the frequency of usage and the productivity. Within parts of speech they may be subdivided semantically, e.g. there are noun forming, adjectival, numeral, verb and adverb forming suffixes (auntie, nighty, etc.). The same approach can take place in the relation of prefixes.