Some Non-Productive Affixes

Noun-forming suffixes -th, -hood

Adjective-forming suffixes -ly, -some, -en, -ous

Verb-forming suffix -en

Prefixes can be classified according to different principles:
1. Semantic classification:
a) prefixes of negative meaning, such as: in- (invaluable), non- (nonformals), un- (unfree) etc,
b) prefixes denoting repetition or reversal actions, such as: de- (decolonize), re- (revegetation), dis- (disconnect),
c) prefixes denoting time, space, degree relations, such as: inter- (interplanetary), hyper- (hypertension), ex- (ex-student), pre- (pre-election), over- (overdrugging) etc.
2. Origin of prefixes:
a) native (Germanic), such as: un-, over-, under- etc.
b) Romanic, such as: in-, de-, ex-, re- etc.
c) Greek, such as: sym-, hyper- etc.
When we analyze such words as: adverb, accompany where we can find the root of the word (verb, company) we may treat ad-, ac- as prefixes though they were never used as prefixes to form new words in English and were borrowed from Romanic languages together with words. In such cases we can treat them as derived words. But some scientists treat them as simple words. Another group of words with a disputable structure are such as: contain, retain, detain and conceive, receive, deceive where we can see that re-, de-, con- act as prefixes and -tain, -ceive can be understood as roots. But in English these combinations of sounds have no lexical meaning and are called pseudo-morphemes. Some scientists treat such words as simple words, others as derived ones.
There are some prefixes which can be treated as root morphemes by some scientists, e.g. after- in the word afternoon. American lexicographers working on Webster dictionaries treat such words as compound words. Britishlexicographerstreatsuchwordsasderivedones.

23. The problem of conversion may prove a pitfall because of possible confusion of the synchronic and diachronic approach- Although the im­portance of conversion has long been recognized, and the causes that foster it seem to have been extensively studied, the synchronic research of its effect in developing a special type of patterned homonymy in the English vocabulary system has been somewhat disregarded until the last decade.

This patterned homonymy, in which words belonging to dif­ferent parts of speech differ in their lexico-grammatical meaning but pos­sess an invariant component in their lexical meanings, so that the meaning of the derived component of the homonymous pair form a subset of the meaning of the prototype, will be further discussed in the chapter on homonymy.

The causes that made conversion so widely spread are to be ap­proached diachronically.¹ Nouns and verbs have become identical in form firsth as a result of the loss of endings. More rarely it is the prefix that is dropped: mind < OE zemynd.

When endings have disappeared phonetical development resulted in the merging of sound forms for both elements of these pairs.

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