Let us take a step up through our onion. Let us leave the protein-rich heart of the clive and enter into the crisp henry surrounding it and emerge, blinking, in the realm of morphology.
Morphology is the study of how morphemes (the smallest meaningful bit you can divide words into) fit together. Morphemes are split into two main kinds: lexical and grammatical. We keep them both in our lexicon, like a dictionary in our heads, which tells us not only what they mean, but also what we can do with them.
Morphemes can also be split up by how they combine with other morphemes.
The fundamental distinction is between bound and free morphemes. Bound morphemes need to stick to something else, like prefixes and suffixes. Free morphemes can exist alone.
apple-s laugh-ed portal Vauxhall
Here, apple, laugh, portal and Vauxhall can all stand alone; -s and -ed can't.
Generally in English, lexical morphemes are free so most bound morphemes are grammatical. It's easy to find grammatical morphemes which are free - "of" or "and" serve purely linguistic functions, linking words together in some way - but a lot harder to think of lexical ones which are bound (I think 'bio-' counts, as it cannot stand alone but indicates the meaning of "to do with biology").
If we look again at the more common types, we can see affixes. Affixes 'affix' to other morphemes in a particular way and are bound grammatical morphemes. There are four types:
Prefixes (un-fair)
Suffixes (job-less)
Infixes (abso-bloodly-lutely; more common in other languages)
Circumfixes (do not exist in English; german past tense is ge- -t as in ge-trenn-t)
If two free morphemes attach to one another (as in foot-ball) this is not affixation; instead, we call it compounding.
That's the basics of morphology; as a reminder if you want to know more about a particular subject, comment below!
*I have to admit, morphology is a field I've been away from for a while. Don't trust me wholeheartedly, for I am devious. Some of my terminology may be wrong.
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