2.3 Word families

Words belonging to the same family comprise the inflections and most common derivatives of a base word or root. Inflections and derivatives are those words resulting from affixation, that is to say adding prefixes or suffixes to the root. On the one hand, inflections are only different forms of the base word resulting from adding suffixes, marking properties “such as tense, number, person, and so forth, [and] they never change the grammatical category of the stems to which they are attached” (Fromkin et al., 2017, p. 46). Thus, the suffix -s, for example, at the end plurals, or indicating third person singular at the end of verbs, is considered an ‘inflectional morpheme’.

On the other hand, derivatives are words with a different meaning from their base word which can result from adding both prefixes and suffixes. In this case, these prefixes and suffixes are considered ‘derivational morphemes’, and they not only add meaning to the original word; the words resulting from this process, that is, derived words, may also have a different grammatical form than the original one.

LAS Activity 203. Affixation

Instructions

Using the previous information, choose the correct answer in the following chart.