19 Derivational Morphology
Derivational morphology and selection
Derivational morphemes are typically choosy about the types of bases they combine with—another word for “choosy” is selective, and so we talk about how derivational affixes select the category of their base.
For example, the suffix -able combines only with verbs, and always creates adjectives meaning “able to be verb-ed”: readable, writeable, playable, employable, and googleable are all possible adjectives in English, even if they don’t appear in a dictionary—while the other words in this list probably do show up in most dictionaries, googleable might not, because google a relatively recent verb (adapted from the name of the company). But as an English speaker I don’t need to check the dictionary to find out if something is a possible English word—if I’m talking to someone and I say that something is “googleable”, I can be confident that they’ll understand me even if they’ve never heard someone use that verb before.
Here is a very incomplete sample of derivational affixes in English, with the category they select on the left side of the arrow, and the category they create on the right side.
| (1) | -tion | V | → | N | |
| -able | V | → | Adj | ||
| -en | V | → | Adj | ||
| -ed | V | → | Adj | ||
| -ing | V | → | Adj or N | ||
| -ment | V | → | N | ||
| -ness | Adj | → | N | ||
| -ity | Adj | → | N | ||
| -ous | N | → | Adj | ||
| -hood | N | → | N | ||
| -ize | N | → | V | ||
| -ly | Adj | → | Adj | ||
| -ish | Adj | → | Adj |
There are many more than this! You’ll see them inside many words if you start paying attention.
Prefixes in English never change the category of the base they attach to, but they express clear meanings, like negation, repetition, order (e.g. pre- and post-), etc. Examples of English derivational prefixes and the categories they select appear in (2):
| (2) | non- | N | → | N | non-issue | |
| Adj | → | Adj | non-distinct | |||
| un- | V | → | V | undo | ||
| Adj | → | Adj | unhappy | |||
| re- | V | → | V | redo |
Derivational morphology can also be even more selective, requiring not only a base that has a certain category, but only attaching to specific roots or bases. A lot of derivational morphology in English was acquired from borrowing words from French and Latin; these “latinate” affixes often prefer to combine with each other, and sometimes only with roots that are also latinate. Such affixes are less productive than other affixes, which combine freely with most bases.
Some of the most productive derivational suffixes in English are -ish, which can attach to most adjectives, -ness, -able, and -ing.
-ing is particularly productive: it can attach to all verbs in English to form adjectives (traditionally called “participles”) or nouns (traditionally called “gerunds”). It is very unusual for a derivational affix to be that productive; usually there are at least a few roots that don’t occur with a derivational affix, for whatever reason.
Order of Affixation
B