Infix
Infix is a type of affix that is inserted within a root or base word, rather than at the beginning or end. It is used in some languages to indicate grammatical relationships or to create new words. Infixes are relatively rare compared to prefixes and suffixes, and they often involve changes to the root word's structure.
6 Key excerpts on "Infix"
eBook - ePub- Kristin Denham, Anne Lobeck(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In Inuktitut, a language of Western Canada, and a member of the Eskimo-Aleut language family, the Infix -pallia, inserted after a verb root, adds the meaning roughly translated as ‘gradually’ to the verb. nungupjut ‘They are disappearing.’ nungup + pallia + jut = nunguppalliajut ‘They are disappearing gradually.’ Here is another example of Infixation from Tagalog, a language of the Philippines. bili ‘buy’ b- in- ili ‘bought’ basa ‘read’ b -in- asa ‘read’ sulat ‘write’ s -in- ulat ‘wrote’ The Infix -in- here is inserted in verbs, after the first consonant of a root, and marks a completed event (something like past tense). A circumfix (from Latin circum ‘around’) surrounds another morpheme. In German, the circumfix ge- + -t surrounds the verb root, to create the perfective form of the verb. kommen ‘to come’ Er ist gekommt. ‘He has come.’ ge + komm + t Expanding inflectional morphology Not all languages express the same inflectional features. In English, the definite article the expresses definiteness, picking out a specific member of a set, in contrast to the indefinite article a : I read the book / I read a book. The indefinite article also expresses number (singular – a book /*a books), but the definite article is unspecified for number, and can be either singular or plural (the book/books). In Arabic, definiteness is marked by a prefix: the noun ‘book’ kitāb is made definite by the prefix al- as in al-kitāb. But in other languages, definite and indefinite articles can express other features, such as grammatical gender, which is different from biological gender (expressed in words such as he/she and in gender-neutral they). Language does not necessarily reflect the realities of gender identities, and speech communities come up with other strategies to reflect those identities. Grammatical gender is reflected in the form of a word: in French, la lune ‘the moon’ is feminine, but in German, der Mond is masculine, and das Mädchen, ‘the girl’ in German, is neuter...
eBook - ePubSyntactic Analysis
The Basics
- Nicholas Sobin(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Roots are the core morphemes that a word is built on. Suffixes are endings that follow a root. Roots may be free or bound. A free root can appear as a word on its own (e.g. book or walk). A bound root cannot. Most English roots are free, but this is often not true of other languages. In Spanish, verb roots are bound – they always appear with an ending of some sort. For instance, the Spanish verb jugar ‘(to) play’ in its various forms always minimally involves (a form of) the root jug and some suffix – the root can never be said by itself. The morphemes that attach to roots to form complex words (words of more than one morpheme) are called affixes. They include suffixes, prefixes, Infixes, and circumfixes. Prefixes such as un- in the word untangle precede the root. Infixes actually intrude into the root – English has no examples of this, so we won't worry about them here. English used to have circumfixes, a simultaneous prefix–suffix combination, and modern German still does. For instance, one form of the German verb machen ‘(to) make’ (root: mach ; infinitive suffix: -en) is the word gemacht ‘made’ (past participle form), containing the root and the past participle circumfix ge - - t. Affixes are bound – they do not occur as words by themselves. Now if the lexicon is a list of roots and affixes, how do these get together to form complex (multi-morphemic) words? A partial answer may lie in considering affixes in more detail. 2.5 Affix Types Two prominent types of affix exist in the lexicon: inflectional affixes and derivational affixes. Inflectional affixes simply give you all of the different forms that a word of a given lexical category can appear in. For example, a verb has five possible forms, as illustrated in (6)...
eBook - ePub- Susan M. Greve(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- For Dummies(Publisher)
...Immigration to the United States also added many words to English, as the immigrants contributed their words to the English language. For example, Yiddish gave English-speakers chutzpah, Yoruba gave goober, and Tagalog gave boondocks. The foundation of English, however, is in German and Latin. Understanding Roots To understand what prefixes and suffixes are, you need to know what a root is. The root is the main part of the word that contains the basic meaning, and you can add affixes to it to create related words. It’s also the form of the word after removing any or all prefixes and suffixes from the word. Prefixes and suffixes change the meaning of the root to which they’re attached. Generally speaking, prefixes don’t usually change the spelling of the root word; however, the spelling of a root word can change when a suffix is added, as in the word inspiration. Here are some simple definitions: A root word is a word to which you can add affixes to create related words (such as hemi-sphere or co-author) A suffix is a word part that you can add to the end of a root word (such as dark-ness) A prefix is a word part that you can add to the beginning of a root word to create a new meaning (such as re-gain or in-complete) The roots of many words in the English language originate in a parent language of English, such as Greek, Latin, or German. You can find the Latin word trudere, for example, in several English words. Trudere in Latin means “to thrust.” From this word comes the English words intrude (to thrust in without invitation), extrude (to thrust something out), and protrude (to stick out). When you add the prefixes in, ex, and pro in front of the root trude, you get different words with slightly different meanings. Suffixes appear at the end of word roots; sometimes they change the spelling as well as the meaning of the root. Take the word credible, for example...
eBook - ePub- Philomena Ott(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The root words have been chosen to demonstrate that affixes can be added at the beginning and ends of words, rather than to give lists of every variation possible. Handy Hint The following root words can be used to generate many examples: form duct port rupt sign struct tend Handy Hint Many more words can be generated from these roots with the use of a dictionary of etymology, games (including computer programs), worksheets, puzzles and texts which use these keyword spellings in meaningful contexts as well as by using cloze procedures for prose passages with the keyword spellings missing (see Ott 2007). Prefixes: an overview According to Crystal (2002) ‘There are over 100 common prefixes and suffixes in English’. These can be used singly or in combination, and, as many schoolchildren delight in discovering, ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ is an example of what can be done with prefixes and suffixes when seeking new words as well as knowing how to spell them. A prefix is a letter or a group of letters that go at the beginning of a word, usually changing the meaning of the word. The NLS (DfEE 1998) defines it as ‘a morpheme which can be added to the beginning of a word, to change its meaning; such as in-finite; inconclusive; in-edible’. Handy Hint The following are the most frequently used prefixes according to Becker et al.’s (1980) analysis of 26,000 high-frequency words: com con de dis ex im in or pre pro re un The initial objective should be to show how prefixes work. Their usefulness can be explained, illustrated and followed by examples. Use root words such as ‘form’; ‘port’; ‘tend’. Brainstorm to generate new words orally, and try to make as many different words as possible...
eBook - ePub- Philip Holmes, Ian Hinchliffe(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...affixes The introduction into the language of foreign affixes has often resulted in two word formation elements with the same meaning existing side by side in the lexicon. A major distinction can be made here between Germanic affixes (i.e. indigenous words + German loans) and Romance affixes (mostly Latin and French loans, some having been borrowed via English): PREFIXES Germanic Romance o– olaglig = in– ineffektiv ineffective sam– samarbete = ko– kooperation cooperation själv– självlärd = auto– autodidakt self-taught åter– återuppbygga = re– rekonstruera reconstruct Note – Själv – and åter – are not strictly speaking prefixes, see 11.2.2.2. SUFFIXES Verb – Germanic Noun (Person) Noun (Activity) granska granskare granskning inspect inspector inspection Verb – Romance Noun (Person) Noun (Activity) inspektera inspektör inspektion inspect inspector inspection Verb – Germanic Noun (Person) Adjective Noun. (Abstract) tillverka tillverkare – tillverkning, tillverkande produce producer production Verb – Romance Noun (Person) Adjective Noun (Activity) producera producent produktiv produktivitet produce producer productive productivity 11.2.2 Productivity 11.2.2.1 Productive affixes Theoretically it is possible to add a productive affix to any word of a particular grammatical or semantic type. A productive affix or word element has two features: 1 It is possible to describe grammatically and/or semantically the elements that can be included. 2 The affix produces a derivative whose meaning is easily discerned from the meaning of the basic word. For example, –bar is an adjective suffix meaning ‘ möjlig att X ’ where X is a verb. Thus –bar can potentially be added to all transitive verb stems. It is an adjective suffix but is also deverbal, see 11.2.5.1 (c)...
eBook - ePubApplying Linguistics in the Classroom
A Sociocultural Approach
- Aria Razfar, Joseph C. Rumenapp(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In some more entertaining lessons we may have had to match two pictures together to form words, like butterfly. What is often left out of these lessons is “how” these words are formed. Here we will discuss two of the processes, namely inflection and derivation, of how the prefixes, suffixes, and roots are used to form words. Inflection The first process words undergo is inflection. Words are inflected to add, or mark, grammatical information. This does not result in changing the part of speech of a word, and does not result in changing the word’s meaning. An example, as we showed above, is that words in English are inflected to show plurality, or are inflected for number. The word “cat” is inflected by adding a suffix “-s” to make “cats.” We noted in Chapter 3 that because of phonological processes that also occur in language, sometimes the addition of a morpheme, or a suffix, will change the sound of the suffix. For example, the same morpheme that marks plurality for “cats” cannot simply be added to “bus.” “Buss” is not the form of the word acceptable in English. So, what happens, then, is that there is the suffixing of “-es” instead of just “-s.” This isn’t a change in the morphology, but rather the phonology. In reality all of these systems are related, but for analysis it is helpful to separate them. One of the assumptions in linguistics is that the word undergoes changes in morphology first, and then phonology, at least in theory. So, one could say lexical item “bus” is inflected for “number,” or bus + -s, and then changes to match the phonology of the language, thus resulting in the word “buses.” So, we can say that -s and -es are the same morpheme, or the plural marker. Inflection usually is seen, consistently, throughout a particular language. If the language inflects for person (i.e., first, second, third), then, usually, all of the verbs will be inflected...
