Samarkand state institute of foreign languages english faculty II department of integrated course of english language

Distribution of affixes
We said above that affixes must attach to a stem, but we did not clarify the order of attachment of stem and affix. We now add that there are different types of affix, according to their distribution. Forexample:
Prefixes precede the stem.
Suffixes follow the stem.
We need this clarification in order to explain why the two words unhappy and happily in are well-formed, whereas *happyun and *lyhappy are not: un- is a prefix, and –ly is a suffix. That is, un- must precede the stem to which it attaches, while –ly must follow its stem. Note the use of a dash following or preceding these affixes. This is essential to make clear whether we’re referring to a prefix or a suffix.
These two types of affix account for affixation processes in English. Other languages have additional types of affix. For example, both Bontoc, a language spoken in the Philippines, and TukangBesi, an Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia, have infixes, affixes that appear in the middle of a stem. Malay, meanwhile, has circumfixes, affixes that surround a stem, in addition to prefixes and suffixes, as illustrated in Figure 6.1.

Bontoc
Adj/N		Infix
fikas ‘strong’	fumikas ‘tobestrong’	-um-
fusul ‘enemy’	fumusul ‘to be an enemy’	-um-
TukangBesi		Infix
Adj/V
to’oge ‘big’	tumo’oge ‘biggest’	–um-
tinti ‘run’	tuminti ‘running’	–um-
Malay
Adj	N	Circumfix
selamat ‘safe’	keselamatan ‘safety’	ke-___–an

Examples of affixes in Bontoc, Tukang Besi and Mala
Meaning of affixes
According to meaning, affixes can be of two types.
Derivational affixes form a new word with a new lexical meaning.
Inflectional affixes form a variant of the word they attach to, adding a grammatical meaning.
You will notice that this difference in the kinds of meanings conveyed by affixes parallels the difference that we discussed in the previous chapter, concerning lexical and grammatical words. Like lexical words which express ideas/concepts, derivational affixes have semantic content. Derivational affixes are so named because when they attach to a root/stem, they derive a new word, i.e. a word with a new lexical meaning. In contrast, inflectional affixes, like grammatical words, carry grammatical meaning. They mark grammatical properties such as tense, number, person and case, and do not change the lexical meaning of the words they attach to.
This difference between lexical and grammatical meaning explains why certain words are regularly given an entry of their own in dictionaries, whereas other words share the same entry. For example, the words commit and commitment, though related, are in fact two words, with two different lexical meanings that entitle each to a separate dictionary entry. In contrast, inflected words (e.g. rooms) are listed under the same entry as their root, given that they represent grammatical variants of the same word.
In derivational affixation (or derivation, for short), the word class of the stem and the word class of the derived word may or may not be the same. This means that derivational affixes may be class-maintaining or class- changing. Consider these two words:
Unhappy commitment
Affixing un– to the Adj happy derives a new Adj (unhappy); un– is a class- maintaining derivational affix. Affixing –ment to the verb commit also derives a new word (commitment), but this time the lexical class of the derived word changes to a noun; –ment is a class-changing derivational affix.
Inflectional affixes, as we saw in (6.1), change the grammatical meaning of the words they attach to. Consequently, inflectional affixation (or inflection) is always class-maintaining. For example, inflectional affixation with plural -s changes the grammatical meaning of the singular noun room to plural rooms, but the lexical category remains unchanged. Both room and rooms are nouns. Similarly, affixation with -ed changes the grammatical meaning of walk from present tense to past tense walked, but the lexical category remains unchanged. Both walk and walked are verbs. If we assume that lexical meaning is more central than grammatical meaning, we can see why inflectional affixes regularly follow derivational affixes in the formation of words. One example is the word commitments, discussed in section 6.2 above.
Using the two criteria of distribution and meaning, we can distinguish English affixes in the following way:

	derivational	inflectional
prefix	✓	X
suffix	✓	✓