English Words

ex-
‘former’
ex-miner, ex-wife, ex-leader, ex-director, ex-pupil, ex-pilot
mis-
‘wrongly, badly’
mis-understand, mis-manage, mis-read, mis-take, misinform, mis-allocate 
mal(e)-
‘bad(ly)’
malcontent, malpractice, maladjusted, malefactor, mal
evolent
42 BUILDING WORDS

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re-
‘again’
re-think, re-take, re-play, re-examine, re-issue
un-
‘negative’
unexciting, unhappy, uncomfortable, unwise, unmanageable, uncool
dis-
‘negative’ (with adjectives)
dishonest, dishonourable, discomfortable
dis-
‘negative, reversive’ (with verbs)
disallow, disagree, disapprove, dislike, disaffirm, disbelieve, disarm
in-
‘negative’ (with adjectives)
inarticulate, inactive, inept, inevitable, intangible, innumerable
un-
‘negative’ (with adjectives)
unoriginal, unusual, unseemly, unripe, unpleasant, unsavoury, unreliable
un-
‘reversive’ (with verbs)
undo, unblock, unpack, unravel, unpick, unseat, unroll, unsaddle
In words of two syllables the initial syllable attracts stress when the word-form realises a verb, but it
repels stress when the word-form represents a noun or adjective. In the latter case stress falls on the second
syllable. It so happens that in many of these words there is a prefix but the presence of a prefix is not the
vital factor. It is being disyllabic that counts. Admittedly, historically words like preserve were formed
using the prefix pre-. But that is no longer relevant. People generally are unaware of it.
[4.10]
Stress on prefix
Stress on first syllable of the base
a. NOUN
VERB
`conduct
con`duct
`contract
con`tract
`convert
con`vert
`digest
di`gest
`export
ex`port
`import
im`port
`increase
in`crease
`permit
per`mit 
`preserve
pre`serve
`project
pro`ject
`present
pre`sent
`produce
pro`duce
`reject
re`ject
`subject
sub`ject
`survey
sur`vey
b.
ADJECTIVE
VERB
`abstract
ab`stract
ENGLISH WORDS 43

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`perfect
per`fect
`present
pre`sent
In some cases, in addition to the stress change, there is also a change in the vowels, e.g. record /`rek:d/
(noun) record /ri`k:d/ (verb). Here we will ignore such phonological changes, which are not important for
our present purposes.
What [4.10] shows is that besides having morphological consequences (creating a word belonging to a
particular grammatical category), affixation also has phonological consequences. Your knowledge of
English word-structure involves knowing the meaning and grammatical class of the words produced using a
given affix. (You need to know the grammatical class of the words you form in order to know in what
grammatical contexts you can deploy them.) But your knowledge goes further than that. It also includes
knowing the pronunciation (and if you are literate, the spelling) of the words formed by attaching that affix
so that you can produce the appropriate forms of the words. As you can see by looking back at the extract
from The BFG, the ability to form, or find in your mental dictionary, the right lexeme is not sufficient. For
competent use of the language you also need to produce correct grammatical words and word-forms
realising your lexical items.
Next, let us survey derivational suffixes. Coverage is not meant to be comprehensive by any means, but it
should be sufficient to provide a reasonably good picture of derivational affixation. In [4.11] I have
provided a representative sample of derivational suffixes together with their general meaning, the
grammatical class of bases that they attach to and the grammatical class of the resulting word. Discussion of
the phonological effects of suffixes will be taken up in 
Chapter 6
. 
[4.11]
DERIVATIONAL SUFFIXES
a. Verb