Page 46 - Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable Guide to Excellent Writing and Speaking

4.4 Affixes

Affixes are semantic elements that can be added to a word to change its
meaning. Prefixes go before, suffixes go after, and infixes go in the middle. They

change the meaning of the word or root to which they are attached.

4.4.1 INFLECTED ENDINGS

An inflected ending is a type of suffix that modifies (1) the tense of a verb to
indicate the time, duration, completeness, quantity, or other quality of what is

being referred to or (2) the number. These inflected endings come—of course,
because this is English—with irregular as well as regular patterns.

In general, the older a word is in English, the more likely it is to be irregular,
because, as mentioned in section 4.0, Spelling and Formatting, English has

changed quite a bit, but some weird old forms still hang around.

See more in section 6.0, Verbs.

4.4.2 DERIVATIONAL SUFFIXES

Suffixes such as -able, -ant, -ly, -ness, -ology, and -ure can change a word from

one part of speech to another. They are known as derivational suffixes. This is a

completely ordinary way to make new words in English (part of its
morphological vigor), and yet this kind of word transformation needlessly makes
some English speakers uneasy, as if a great gaffe is being committed. It isn’t.

This is another place where the history of English means that different

suffixes that affect meaning in the same way are used with different roots and
cannot be interchanged. For example, -ic, -al, and -y can all turn nouns into

adjectives that mean “like [whatever the root is],” but hero becomes heroic and
not heroal or heroy.

4.4.3 INFIXES

Infixes, which go in the middle of words, are rare in English, and the ones that