Leder: English 4205 HW 4 F19 September 14, 2019

The purpose of this HW is to help you become conversant with the classification and patterns of
English affixes. Note that the derivational system of Spanish is practically identical to English;
however, the Spanish inflectional system is quite different. Why do you suppose this is?

I. Please re-read through section 5.0 on the classification of morphemes and pay particular attention
to the chart on p. 19. You should also look through section 7.0 on syntactic categories, because you
need to be able to accurately classify words by syntactic category. We will work on this in class,
but you should try to understand it on your own from the text first.

II. Now study the table on the worksheet (separate file called HW 4 S15 WRKSHT), and find
words that fit the classifications given.
A) If you need help finding derivational affixes, you can look on the charts I’ve posted in
the Course Texts folder, on derivational affixes.
1) but try to find your own words, not ones on the chart.

B) For the HW, put the roots in bold, derivational affixes in plain type, and the inflectional
suffixes in italics.

C) Note that some forms may be odd, but still possible (like “restandardizing”). However,
the forms you create must be reasonable; that is, they should not sound so strange that they
would probably never be used.

D) The first two have been done for you. Note that inflections always go last.

E) Words with two or more roots are called compounds. Examples are words such as:
1) Cowboy, suitcase, overcoat, supermarket, etc.

F) There may be a few cases that you cannot fill, because you cannot find a word that fits
the affixes listed. This is OK. Some of these are pretty rare, so if you can’t find a plausible
example, then just leave those cases blank. We’ll fill them in, in class.

Please do this work independently or with another student. Please bring your worksheet to
class on Tuesday. Do as much as you can, and we will workshop the rest. Please bring one
copy of the worksheet to turn in, and one to workshop.