The term word-building or derivational pattern is used to denote a meaningful combination of stems and affixes that occur regularly enough to indicate the part of speech, the lexico-semantic category and semantic peculiarities common to most words with this particular arrangement of morphemes. Every type of word-building as well as every part of speech has a characteristic set of patterns. According to their derivational structure words form into 2 large classes: simple non-derived words; derivatives complexes. Complexes are classified according to the type of the underline derivational pattern into: derived; compound words.
Derived words fall into: affixational words which in their term are classified into suffixational and prefixational derivatives and conversions. Each derivational type of words is unequally represented in different parts of speech.
Pattern 1: Derivatives: 1 Stem + suffix: beautiful;
2 prefix + stem: unlucky;
3 prefix + stem + suffix: ungenlemanly.
Pattern 2: Compound words: stem + stem: bedroom.
Pattern 3: Compound derivatives: stem + stem + suffix: shortsighted.
Pattern 4: Shortenings: mike = microphone; USSR etc. The largest class in the English vocabulary is derived words: 67% of nouns,86% of adjectives. Compounds: 15% of nouns,4% of adjectives. Simple stems: 18% of nouns,10% of adjectives. According to frequency counts about 60% of the total number of nouns and 62% of the total number of adjectives in current use — are simple words.
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