How ae English words formed.docVIP

How are English words formed? By using rules of word formation,such as derivation,conversion and compounding,the English people,with only twenty-six letters,have created so many new words as to more than one million. There exist in every language rules which relate to the formation of new words,morphological rules,which determine how words are formed.Just as knowledge of a language implies knowledge of its phonology,so it implies knowledge of its certain aspects of morphology which have syntactic implications.Morphemes,free and bound morphemes,content and function morphemes,derivational and inflectional morphemes,roots,stems and affixes are all absolutely necessary notions and indispensable elements in English word-formation process.The reason why morphemes can be combined into words is that there exist,in English as well as in other languages,morphological rules,which determine how morphemes are combined to form new words. In a word which is composed of more than one morpheme,there is one morpheme that is central and contains the principal lexical meaning and one or more others that are peripheral and are attached to the central morpheme. The central morpheme in a word is often a free morpheme and is called the root.The peripheral morphemes that are attached to the root are always bound morphemes and are called affixes.When a root morpheme is combined with an affix,it forms a stem,which may or may not be a word(painter is both a word and a stem;-ceive+er is only a stem). There are three main types of word-formation,the first of which can be referred to as derivation / affixation (prefixation and suffixation).Prefixation is the way of putting a prefix in front of the base of a word,sometimes with,but more usually without,a change of word class(e.g.pre+determine---predetermine),while suffixation puts a suffix after the base of a word,sometimes without,but more usually with,a change of word class(e.g.friend+ship---friendship).Conversion is the second