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Derivational morphology often involves the addition of a derivational suffix or other affix. Such an affix usually applies to words of one lexical category (part of speech) and changes them into words of another such category. For example, one effect of the English derivational suffix -ly is to change an adjective into an adverb (slow → slowly).
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as un- , -ation , anti- , pre- etc., introduce a semantic change to the word they are attached to.
Unlike derivational suffixes, English derivational prefixes typically do not change the lexical category of the base (and are so called class-maintaining prefixes). Thus, the word do, consisting of a single morpheme, is a verb, as is the word redo, which consists of the prefix re-and the base root do.
In linguistics, back-formation is the process of forming a new word by removing actual affixes, or parts of the word that is re-analyzed as an affix, from other words to create a base. [5] Examples include: the verb headhunt is a back-formation of headhunter; the verb edit is formed from the noun editor [5]
The term "word" has no well-defined meaning. [6] Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: lexeme and word-form [definition needed]. Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals. [7] For instance, the lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate.
Derivational suffixes fall into two categories: class-changing derivation and class-maintaining derivation. Particularly in the study of Semitic languages, suffixes are called affirmatives, as they can alter the form of the words. In Indo-European studies, a distinction is made between suffixes and endings (see Proto-Indo-European root).
Affixes may be inflectional, indicating how a certain word relates to other words in a larger phrase, or derivational, changing either the part of speech or the actual meaning of a word. [6] Most roots in English are free morphemes (e.g. examin-in examination, which can occur in isolation: examine), but others are bound (e.g. bio-in biology).
Adding a prefix to the beginning of an English word changes it to a different word. For example, when the prefix un-is added to the word happy, it creates the word unhappy. The word prefix is itself made up of the stem fix (meaning "attach", in this case), and the prefix pre-(meaning "before"), both of which are derived from Latin roots.