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

2.2. Types of affix in English
Types of affix in English shows that the derivational affixes of English can be either prefixes or suffixes. For example, un- in unhappily is a derivational prefix, while -ly in the same word is a derivational suffix. In contrast, the inflectional affixes of English are all suffixes. In fact, contemporary English has only eight inflectional affixes: four bound to verbs, two bound to nouns, and two bound to adjectives.
Other languages, however, have inflectional prefixes as well as suffixes. One example is Swahili (the major African lingua franca). In many languages, nouns must belong to different grammatical classes, called genders. You may be familiar with gender from languages like French, which has two (masculine and feminine) or German, which has three (masculine, feminine and neuter). In these languages, gender is marked by suffixes. Swahili has several different genders (e.g. for ‘human’, ‘other living things’, ‘liquids’, etc.) and all are marked with inflectional prefixes. As in other gendered languages, adjectives qualifying a noun must show the same gender inflection as the noun. Here is one example from Swahili with a noun and an adjective for the gender sometimes called “Class 6” (in Swahili, the adjective follows the noun):
Example of gender inflection in Swahili

N	Adj	Inflectionalprefix
tunda ‘fruit’	zuri ‘good’	ma-
matundamazuri	‘goodfruit’

Affix identification
In section 5.4.3, we listed three criteria to identify morphemes, namely sound, grammar and meaning. The same criteria can of course be used to identify different affixes. Let’s see how the three criteria apply to the affix -ly in the words sharply, kindly and happily. If all three criteria are obeyed, then we are dealing with the same affix. If any one criterion is not met, then we are dealing with different affixes.
Sound. In all three words, the affix is pronounced the same way, [li] (conventions to represent pronunciation are dealt with in the next chapter). In other cases, the pronunciation of an affix may be predictable by rule. Predictable variation of this kind also satisfies the sound criterion.
Grammar. The affix attaches to the same stem class, in the same position (as a prefix or as a suffix), and the lexical category of the resulting word must be the same for all the words under consideration. In this case, -ly is suffixed to an Adj to form an Adv in all three words.
Meaning. The affix establishes a regular meaning relationship between the stem and the word resulting from the affixation. In this case, the meaning of the newly derived word can be paraphrased as ‘in a manner’, where the Adj replaces the blank. Forexample, sharply means ‘in a sharp manner’.
Note that the meaning paraphrase must contain the stem of the word, in this case the adjectives sharp, kind and happy, in order to make the meaning relationship between the stem and the derived word absolutely clear. We can now generalise our observations about the formation of the words sharply, kindly and happily to all other words containing the same affix by means of a shorthand rule, like this:
Adj + –ly → Adv, ‘in a _ manner’
In rule notation of this kind, the plus sign represents sequential ordering of morphemes, and the arrow indicates the result of that ordering. This rule summarises all the information that we need, in order to identify the affix –ly. You can use this rule to check for yourself that sharply contains the same affix as words like brightly, lightly or beautifully.
The observations and analysis that we developed in this section of course apply to any complex word formed through affixation, not just the three adverbs under discussion here. Otherwise, our conclusions would be useless in a scientific account of language.