Vatsalritz

INTRODUCTION

Affixation is one of the most productive ways of word building throughout the history of English. The main function of affixation in Modern English is to form one part of speech from another; the secondary function is to change the lexical meaning of the same part of speech. The process of affixation consists in coining a new word by adding an affix or several affixes to some root morpheme. The role of the affix in this procedure is very important and therefore it is necessary to consider certain facts about the main types of affixes. Affixation is one of the most productive ways of word-building throughout the history of English. Affixation is divided into suffixation and prefixation. The present paper is devoted to the study of polysemy, homonymy and synonymy of English affixes. As is known, language is never stable: sounds, constructions, grammatical elements, word-forms and word-meanings are all exposed to alteration. Derivational affixes are no exception in this respect, they also undergo semantic change. Consequently many commonly used derivational affixes are polysemantic in Modern English. The various changes that the English language has undergone in the course of time have led to chance coincidence in form of two or more derivational affixes. As a consequence, and this is characteristic of Modern English, many homonymic derivational affixes can be found among those forming both different parts of speech and different semantic groupings within the same part of speech. Borrowed affixes, especially of Romance origin are numerous in the English vocabulary. It would be wrong, though, to suppose that affixes are borrowed in the same way and for the same reasons as words. An affix of foreign origin can be regarded as borrowed only after it has begun an independent and active life in the recipient language, that is, is taking part in the word-making processes of that language. This can only occur when the total of words with this