Affixation: the ‘master word’ approach
At first glance, this activity – a 14,000 word vocabulary generated from 14 words – may have
looked improbable. How could each word somehow generate 1000 other words? Even if each
word were constituted of 3 parts, the thinking often goes, that only takes us up to 42 words.
Those with a more advanced education in Mathematics are more likely to understand that the
Maths doesn’t work like this: if each prefix can at least notionally be attached to each root, 14
prefixes multiplied by 14 roots is 196, the same goes for each root-suffix combination, and by
the time you’ve thought about all the prefix-root-suffix combinations, you need a calculator.
There is not a simple Maths solution to this puzzle, though. The English language has evolved
over many centuries, so what is logically possible in terms of word formation has not necessarily
happened. In addition, the way that prefixes, roots and suffixes have come into the language at
different points in the history of the language, and without a language academy to regulate them,
most have a number of variations in form. Knowing that the “spect” root in aspect can also
appear in words as “spec”, “spi” and “spic” very quickly enables us to refocus our perspective on
the puzzle, and to see that 14,000 words from 14 is not at all beyond the bounds of probability.
The table below shows the constituent parts of the 14 words.
One example of re-combination would be e- + duc + -ate or even e- + duc + -ate + ion.
Others would be mono- + log(ue), pro- + fic + (i) –ent and sup- + pos + -ed.
Word
aspect
Prefix 2
detain
epilogue
indisposed
insist
intermittent
mistranscribe
monograph
nonextended
offer
oversufficient
il-, im-, in-, ir
misnon-
over-
precept
reproduction
uncomplicated
reun-
Prefix 1
a-, ac-, ad-,
af-, ag-, al-,
an-, ap-, as-,
atdeepidisil-, im-, in-, ir
intertransmonoe-, exob-, oc-, of-,
opsub-, suc-,
suf-,
sup-,
sur-, sus
preproco-,
cog-,
col-, com-,
con-, cor
Root
spec,
spi,
spic, spect
tain,
ten,
tent, tin
log
pon, pos
sist
mit, miss
scrib, scrip
graph, graf
tend, tens
fer
fac,
fact,
fec, fic, fas,
fea
cad,
cap,
cas,
ceiv,
cept, cid
duc, duct
pli, ply
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Suffix 1
Suffix 2
-ed
-ent
-ed
-ent
-ion
-ate
-ed
You may have questioned whether or not these were real words. They all look feasible, but in
fact mistranscribe, nonextended and oversufficient are not recognised as legitimate English
words in the Oxford English Dictionary. You may have wondered about this if you typed the
words into a document as the spellchecker in Microsoft Word (if you were using this) doesn’t
recognise them either. This is a curious quirk of the original academic paper, but the fact that
we could probably have attempted a definition of these three words suggests the power even a
tacit understanding of morphology (word building) has on our ability both to read unfamiliar
words and to generate new ones.
You may also have questioned the validity of the activity: the yeah but so what? response. In
Applied Linguistics, this is a pertinent question, as this branch of linguistics is concerned with the
practical application of knowledge about language to real-life problems or situations. Affixation
has been of interest to Applied Linguists working in education and particularly perhaps in
Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). In this field there is a long-standing interest in
finding productive ways to help language learners develop vocabulary quickly and efficiently.
Understanding morphology, it is argued, helps learners to decode unfamiliar words from their
components.
There has been much research and debate about affixation and how it might best serve these
educational purposes. We gave you quite an old (1958) starting point. This is curious and
interesting in its own right and could be of value in helping some learners understand the nature
of more intellectual vocabulary. One study quoted in Russell (1993:26) suggested that teaching
low-achieving native-English-speaking children the most important Latin and Greek roots and
affixes significantly improved their vocabulary and reading ability. This is a popular belief but
there are important questions to be asked here. Does it work with second language learners?
What about the enormous variations in level of language proficiency of second language
learners? Are some affixes more helpful to learn than others?
These are the kinds of question which more recent research has addressed. Bauer and Nation
identify four criteria for establishing how useful affixes are: their frequency, regularity,
productivity and predictability. Applying these, Nation identifies five bands in which suffixes
might be learned, starting with suffixes such as –able, -er, and –ish; then those such as –al, ation and –ess; then –age, -al, -ally; then –ee, -ic and –ify; and finally –ar, -ate and –et. This is a
thoughtful approach, and it looks a reasonable basis on which to proceed as a teacher.
However, this pragmatic desire to reduce language to an efficient system for the purposes of
classroom teaching downplays both the complexity of language and the naturalness of learning
language in most other social contexts. And although teaching prefixes and suffixes can be
helpful, and also quite fun when looking at the entirely legitimate word
antidisestablishmentarianism, teaching word roots is a much more complex business, as you will
almost certainly appreciate from this activity.
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