Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The act of affixing, attaching, or appending; affixion.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The adding of an
affix to a word.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the act of attaching or affixing something
- noun formation of a word by means of an affix
- noun the result of adding an affix to a root word
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word affixation.
Examples
-
[...] nonhuman animals may have the capacity to learn surface transformations involved in affixation, but they cannot link them to other aspects of linguistic structure.
“Quotes” and monkey grammar at the BBC « Motivated Grammar 2009
-
[...] nonhuman animals may have the capacity to learn surface transformations involved in affixation, but they cannot link them to other aspects of linguistic structure.
-
In fact, this method (zero-affixation) of forming nouns from verbs used to be quite commonplace.
-
If affixation means forming a word by adding an affix (e.g. frosty from frost, refusal from refuse, instrumentation from instrument), then back-formation is essentially this process in reverse: it adapts an existing word by removing its affix, usually a suffix (e.g. sulk from sulky, proliferate from proliferation, back-form from back-formation).
-
In summary, their “results suggest that, in the absence of training, cotton-top tamarins learn a rule that is formally similar to affixation patterns [...] in natural language.”
-
If affixation means forming a word by adding an affix (e.g. frosty from frost, refusal from refuse, instrumentation from instrument), then back-formation is essentially this process in reverse: it adapts an existing word by removing its affix, usually a suffix (e.g. sulk from sulky, proliferate from proliferation, back-form from back-formation).
-
In summary, their “results suggest that, in the absence of training, cotton-top tamarins learn a rule that is formally similar to affixation patterns [...] in natural language.”
“Quotes” and monkey grammar at the BBC « Motivated Grammar 2009
-
When I wrote that back-formation was “essentially [affixation] in reverse”, I was simplifying matters somewhat.
-
In fact, this method (zero-affixation) of forming nouns from verbs used to be quite commonplace.
-
Maybe the governance had passed away from affixation from her obsession with gasoline.
Comments
Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.