The morphological productivity of selected ... - Helda - Helsinki.fi

introducing elements such as bi-, di-, hyper-, hypo-, meta-, micro- and multi- – the
number of prefixes outnumbering that of suffixes (Kastovsky 2006: 170). In
addition, any learned affixes, or combining forms, 3 have acquired new meanings
(Hughes 2004: 347). For example, extra- used to mean ‘out of’, as in
extraordinary (‘outside the scope of ordinary’) but is nowadays used to denote a
meaning ‘more than the usual’, as in extra strong. Similarly, super- ‘above’ and
ultra- ‘beyond’ are increasingly used to stress
size.
Kastovsky summarizes that the overall structure of English
vocabulary has changed and the number of derivational patterns available has
increased enormously from Old English to the present day, “partly rivalling each
other, partly restricting each other according to etymological domains” (2006:
170). In a similar vein, Hughes writes that different word-formation patterns are
used with greater flexibility in contemporary English than they were before:
recent coinages that exploit the suffix -able include, for example, such words as
doable, puttable and liveable (2000: 346).
2.2. Combining forms
2.2.1 Defining combining forms
It was stated above that affixes are always bound morphemes that attach to a root
or a base. What should then be thought about such words as neuro-logy or biology?
At first sight it seems that lexemes like these are formed with a prefix and a
suffix but no root, which of course runs counter to the basic assumption that
words should always contain a root (see Bauer 1983: 213–214).
Carstairs-McCarthy offers a partial solution by stating that affixes
are always bound but roots are not always free (2002: 20). Thus the first element
in words like audi-ence, magn-ify, or applic-ant is actually a bound root, since
they cannot occur alone in English (Castairs-McCarthy 2002: 19). The common
denominator with all these words is that they are all loanwords, borrowed either
3 The distinction between affixes and combining forms will be discussed in more detail in section
2.2.
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