Words: 925
In a language the importance of know an extensive set of words and the respective use of these and all the rules can demonstrate and be helpful in aspects in daily life. Morphology is the science that studies the morphemes, small units in a language with meaning. Words are composed by these morphemes that have different types and classifications, free morphemes with their functional and lexical subtypes and bound morphemes with their derivation and inflectional subdivisions.
There are thousands of words in a engage that it is difficult to say that a person completely know an extensive range of words. Almost all words in a language have different grammatical variations that express or not a different meaning. This is the case of affixes, parts of words at the beginning or at the end that work as a type of modifiers in order to get a new word and in some cases the new word can pertain to a different grammatical – word class or not. Affixes at the beginning are called prefixes.
These elements edit the word to create a new word but the grammatical type does not change. On the other hand, the suffixes those are at the end of a word work with inflectional and derivation types that in some cases change the grammatical class of a word but it is better explained in this essay. When thinking about morphology, the most common idea that comes up to people minds is a part of biology that studies the form of organisms. It is well known that Biology is a quite extensive field that involves a lot of branches as the already mentioned.
As in Biology, the field of linguistics involves several arms; one of them is curiously morphology as well. On the other hand and grading on linguistics, Morphology refers to the sub-discipline involved in word formation or to the branch of linguistics that deals with words, their internal structure, and how they are formed. (Bois, 2005). In definition, these branches share some features because both of them are in charge of the structure and form study. Until here we can say they have got similar functions even though they work on different fields.
From here on these disciplines are split up and we just focusing on the field of morphology and one of its sub-discipline on linguistics that is the case of fixation. First of all, it is necessary to define what fixation is. It is known as a process of word formation that attaches to bases. This process consists on that one or more affixes are attached to a root word to derive or produce a new word. (Play,2003). The reason why is called fixation is because an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a root of the word whenever we want to produce a new one.
An affix may be: a prefix or a suffix which are the most common. “An affix is always bound, but a root is often free. If a particular morpheme occurs in isolation as a word, it must be a root. (Kroger, 2005114). Based on this we affirm that all the affixes belong to bound morpheme category and the root of the word always will be the free morpheme. In order to avoid confusion, a root of the word is the essential part of a word. This means it is the part of the word where the affix or affixes are going to be attached.
Example given: Disk – agree – meet In the example above, the word “disagreement” is divided in three parts: The underlined parts: “disk” and “meet” are the affixes and the bold part is the root of the word. It is important to state that even though prefixes and suffixes re affixes and belong to fixation, all of them have got a different function, meaning and these are attached in a distinct part of the stem/root of the word. That is why we are going to analyze each one of them deeper.
To begin with according to (Crystal, 1997:90) a prefix is “an affix is placed before the base of the word”. In other words it is a letter or group of letters adjunct at the beginning of the word that partly indicates meaning. Example given: Im -?? possible As well as disagreement, the word impossible is divided in this case in two arts but now the bold part is indicated the prefix which is “IM” and the root Of the word is the second part “possible”. As its rule says, it is established before the root word. The most common prefixes are: UN, re, IM, disk.
As is in the case of the following words: unforgettable, replay, impossible, disappointed Once established prefixes it is time to analyze suffixes. As well as prefixes a suffix is a letter or group of letters of the word that partly indicates meaning, they have got the same function but are attached in the opposite side of the words, this means at the end. As we have mentioned at the beginning of this essay, all the affixes are bound morphemes and they also are classified in two categories: Inflectional and Derivation.
Inflectional are those bound morphemes which its suffixes are found in the following grammatical properties and it has got as feature that word class never changes. Grammatical properties person singular present deed past tense.