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Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes that modify a verb's tense, mood, aspect, voice, person, or number or a noun's case, gender, or number, rarely affecting the word's meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited.
Unlike derivational suffixes, English derivational prefixes typically do not change the lexical category of the base (and are so called class-maintaining prefixes). Thus, the word do, consisting of a single morpheme, is a verb, as is the word redo, which consists of the prefix re-and the base root do.
Prefixes, like all affixes, are usually bound morphemes. [1] English has no inflectional prefixes, using only suffixes for that purpose. Adding a prefix to the beginning of an English word changes it to a different word. For example, when the prefix un-is added to the word happy, it creates the word unhappy.
Affixes are bound by definition. [5] English language affixes are almost exclusively prefixes or suffixes: pre-in "precaution" and -ment in "shipment". Affixes may be inflectional, indicating how a certain word relates to other words in a larger phrase, or derivational, changing either the part of speech or the actual meaning of a word.
For example, the negating prefix un-is more productive in English than the alternative in-; both of them occur in established words (such as unusual and inaccessible), but faced with a new word which does not have an established negation, a native speaker is more likely to create a novel form with un-than with in-. The same thing happens with ...
It is not usually possible to tell from the form of a word which class it belongs to; inflectional endings and derivational suffixes are unique and specific to. On the other hand, most words belong to more than one word class. For example, run can serve as either a verb or a noun (these are regarded as two different lexemes). [3]