[Corpora-List] list of all English affixes?

[maxwell]

On Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:18:40 -0400, Laura Christopherson
<llchrist at email.unc.edu> wrote:
> I am wondering if anyone knows where I could get a list of all English 
> affixes?

This question ought to be in a FAQ, it keeps coming up.

It is of course not an easily answered question (at least when formulated
this way), since it's not always clear what an affix is.  Are per-, re-,
de-, con- prefixes in words like perceive, receive, deceive, and conceive?
They don't have any recognizable meaning in English.  (Compare permit,
prefer; remit, repeal, and so forth.)  Are -ceive and -mit suffixes, or
stems, or neither?  If pre- is a prefix in 'prefer', is it the same prefix
in the word 'prefix'?  And are per- and pre- allomorphs?

Turning to inflectional affixes, is -t in burnt, rent, and so forth an
affix (in particular an allomorph of -ed)?  If so, what about the /ee/ in
geese, or the -en in oxen?

OK, enough of that.  Some places to look include the major handbooks of
English grammar.  I have the old Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik "A
Grammar of Contemporary English", which has an appendix on "Word Formation"
with lists of affixes (in my copy of the 1972 edition).  The much more
recent "Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" by Rodney D. Huddleston
and Geoffrey K. Pullum has chapters on both inflectional morphology and
word formation.  Many dictionaries have lists of affixes.  The 'ENGLEX'
grammar that came with Evan Antworth's PC-KIMMO v2 had a file of affixes. 
And a quick google search reveals sites like http://www.affixes.org/, which
have enormous lists of English affixes.

All affixes?  I don't know, but you can easily find lists of more than
most of us can deal with.  The difficult part will be deciding which ones
are really affixes, both in general, and in particular words.

   Mike Maxwell
   U MD

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