When
we deal with Morphology, we deal with the structure of words and how they are
formed. In the sentences listed below, the word presidential represents
the combination of two morphemes,
president and the affix -ial - The affixation
of president with the derivational
affix -ial morphing the noun
presidential into the adjective,
presidential.
a. The presidential candidate will give
an expensive dinner in Lee's honor.
b. Will the presidential candidate give an expensive
dinner in Lee's honor?
c. Will give the presidential candidate give an
expensive dinner in Lee's honor?
In
addition to the derivational affixation, there is a second type of affixation,
which adds additional information. This is called inflectional affixation.
An example of an inflectional affix is adding the letter -s to the word
president to create the new word presidents. While the derivational affix
changes the word from one form, such as a noun, to another, such as an
adjective, the inflectional affix offers more information about the word, such
as the pluralizing of the noun president. President remains in the noun
form.
English
speakers intuitively understand morphology regardless of whether we can
identify it. We know that a president can be presidential or there can be
multiple presidents, yet we are unlikely to think of anything being a
presidenter or presidentive.
Other
processes we use to create new words in English include blending, clipping, compounding, coining and creating new words from
common acronyms (such as AIDS).
To learn more about affixation, click next.
(Lobeck 5)
Lobeck,
Anne. Discovering Grammar: An Introduction to English
Sentence Structure. New York: Oxford, 2000.