Creating New Words
Common Prefixes and Suffixes
By far the most important aspect of English morphology for our ELLs is the use of prefixes and suffixes. Here are some examples:
| Prefixes | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| pre | before | predict |
| anti | against | antibacterial |
| un | not | uncommon |
| bi | two, twice | bilingual |
| inter | between, among | intermediary |
| Suffixes | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| -able | capable of | adaptable |
| -er, -or | the one who . . . | teacher |
| -ful | full of | useful |
| -ize | to make like | trivialize |
| -ism | action or practice | communism |
Notice how these suffixes or morphemes above change the part of speech of the word they are attached to. For example, adapt is a verb, but adaptable is an adjective. The type of affixation (an addition of a prefix or suffix that turns one word class into another e.g. happy (adj) → happiness (noun), or changes the meaning while keeping the same word class e.g. happy (adj) → unhappy (adj). We call this type of process lexical affixation, or derivation, but there is another type of affixation very familiar to language English language teachers, inflexion, which is the conjugating of words to express grammatical meaning such as –ed, -ing, -s (plural and 3rd person singular) - er (comparative) and – est (superlative). Inflexion does not change the word class or the lexical meaning of the original root. It only affects its grammar. We use inflectional morphemes almost every time we speak:
Verb + s plays
Verb + ed played
Verb + ing playing
If you have experience with another language like French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish, you’ll appreciate the fact that the verb in English is relatively simple. For example, in Spanish there are approximately 87 forms for each verb! Of course, that includes all the auxiliaries like the Spanish equivalents of have and had. Still, English verbs are less complex, by far. For example, in the present tense, English only has one inflexion mark (-s) for the 3rd person singular (John plays football). Also, in most cases in English, there is only one inflexion (-ed) for past tense verbs (John played football). However, the simplicity of the morphemes in English is overshadowed by the complexity of the pronunciation of those two morphemes –s and –ed, since each of them has three voiced and voiceless variants. We’ll discuss this more later on.
Nouns
In English, we can make nouns into plurals and possessives simply by adding an s.
| One book | two books |
| The book’s cover | |
| John’s book |
Adjectives and Adverbs
Common suffixes that are used for adjectives and adverbs:
-er — for comparatives
clear + er = clearer
fast + er = faster
-est — for superlatives
clear + est = clearest
fast + est = fastest
-ly — adverbs
clear + ly = clearly
Comparing Inflectional Systems
Read the excerpt from the article, Morphology, by Dr. Elizabeth Platt of Florida State University to better understand how our ELLs acquire the inflection system in English.
