Affixation
AFFIXATION Affixation is a morphological process whereby a bound morpheme, an affix, is attached to a morphological base. Diachronically, the English word affix was first used as a verb and has its origin in Latin: affixus , past participle of the verb affigere, ad- ‘to’ + figere ‘to fix’. Affixation falls in the scope of Morphology where bound morphemes are either roots or affixes. Prefixes (affixes that precede the root) and suffixes (affixes that follow the root) are the most common types of affixes cross-linguistically. Affixes mark derivational ( -er in teach-er ) and inflectional ( -s in teacher-s ) changes, and affixation is the most common strategy that human languages employ for derivation of new words and word forms. However, languages vary in the ways they express the same semantics, and if in English the noun biolog-ist is derived from biology through the addition of the suffix -ist , in Russian (and other Slavic languages) the same derivation d