A DESCRIPTION OF ENGLISH DERIVATIONAL SUFFIXES

Abstract

In present-day English there are quite a number of suffixes which have their origin in OE or which have been derived directly or indirectly from French, Latin or Greek. These various kinds of suffixes have made the English vocabularies very rich by forming many derivative words. Thus it is evident that suffixes have played an important role in word formation. Concerning the derivational suffixes, there appeared a few treatises such as Koziol's Handbuch der englischen Wortbildungslehre or Jespersen's Modern English Grammar vol. VI. These linguists focused their attention mainly on the origin or meaning of suffixes, disregarding the formal description. With structural linguistics, on the other hand, the center of interests has been placed on the description of formal character of the derivational suffixes and a few fragmental literatures based on this methodology have been written by the linguists, but no exhaustive and systematic study has yet been presented. This paper, though I do not by any means claim to be a complete research, aims at making a descriptive statement of the morphological and functional characteristics of English derivational suffixes. In the introductory section a definition of such technical terms as 'base', 'stem', 'prefix' and 'derivational suffix' will be given in order to provide a starting point of the discussion. The forms of a suffix, needless to say, must be described in terms of their phonemic form, not in terms of their spelling. So, in section I, phonemic forms occurring in the word final or non-word final position will be stated. In the next suffix is appended. There are few derivational suffixes which cause some sorts of phonemic alternation or stress shift in the preceding base or stem. In the third section mention will be made of the type of alternation caused by such suffixes. In the foregoing two sections (sec. 2 & 3) I have made a description of a base, stem and a suffix quite irrespective of each other, so in section 4 a descriptive statement will be presented as to the interrelation of these two elements. In some cases several suffixes occur in succession after a base or a stem. The fifth section will deal with the interrelation of these suffixes appearing successively after a base or a stem and section six will be devoted to the statement as to how to make a description of the function of a suffix. In the last section which is added as an appendix, I will show, taking the suffix 'ity' as an example, how to describe English derivational suffixes, by closely following the statements which have been made thus far.