UNIT 3: WORD- BUILDING

* Roots words
3.1. Some basic e.g. house, book, tree, plant, plan
concepts Words which have only a root morpheme in its structure.
This type is widely represented by a great number of
words belonging to the original English stock or to
earlier borrowings and, in Modern English, has been
greatly enlarged by the type of word-building called
conversion.
* Derived words
e.g. happiness, teacher, wonderful, modernization
Words which consist of a root and an affix (or several
affixes) are called derived words. Derived words are
produced by the process of word-building known as
affixation (or derivation), or word-formation, in English.
* Compound words
e.g. dancing - hall, dancing - partner, mother-in-law
Another widespread word - structure is a compound
word consisting of two or more stems. Words of this
structural type are produced by the word-building
process called composition.
* Shortenings
The somewhat odd-looking words like pram, and M.P.
lab are called shortenings, contractions and shortening
(contraction).

3.2. Affixation 3.2.1. Roots and affixes

Morphemes (minimal units of meaning) are of two basic
kinds: roots and affixes. For most morphemes, it is clear
which class they belong in. There are various properties
that typically cluster together, allowing us to distinguish
the two types.

3.2.2. Types of affixes

Affixes can also be classified into productive and non -
productive types.
Productive affixs are the ones which take part in
deriving new words. The best way to identify them is to
look for them among neologisms and the so called nonce
- words. They are formed on the level of living speech
and reflect the most the most productive patterns in word
building. (e.g. Professor Pringle was a thinnish, baldish,
dispeptic - lookingish cove with an eye like a haddock.
3.2.3. Greek and Latin affixes
(Read the table in the document)
3.2.4. Suffixes
(Read the table in the document)
The meaning of a derived word is always a sum of the
meanings of its constituent morphemes or morphemes:
un / eat / able = "not fit to eat " where not stands for un-
and fit for - able. The morpheme is the smallest
indivisible component of the word possessing a meaning
of its own. Adjectives formed with the productive suffix
-y show a wide variety of subtle shades of meaning. The
mutual influence of root and affix creates a wide range
of subtle nuances so that the meanings of the affixes can
be altered by their mutual influence on the root.