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Linguistics

Notes 26.2 Complex Words

The nature of stress was explained and some broad general rules were given for deciding which
syllable in a word should receive primary stress. The words that were described were called
“simple” words; “simple” in this context means “not composed of more than one grammatical
unit”, so that, for example, the word ‘care’ is simple while ‘careful’ and ‘careless’ (being composed
of two grammatical units each) are complex; ‘carefully’ and ‘carelessness’ and also complex, and
are composed of three grammatical units each. Unfortunately, as was suggested, it is often difficult
to decide whether a word should be trated as complex or simple. The majority of English words
ofmore than one syllable (polysyllabic words) have come from other languages whose way of
constructing words is easily recognisable; for example, we can see how combining ‘mit’ with the
prefixes ‘per-’, ‘sub-’, ‘com-’, produced ‘permit’, ‘submit’, ‘commit’ – words which have come into
English from Latin. Similarly, Greek has given us ‘catalogue’, ‘analogue’, ‘dialogue’, ‘monologue’,
in which the prefixes ‘cata-’, ‘ana-’, ‘dia-’, ‘mono-’ are recognisable. But we cannot automatically
treat the separate grammatical units of other languages as if they were separate grammatical units
of English. If we did, we would not be able to study English morphology without first studying
the morphology of five or six other laguages, and we would be forced into ridiculous analyses
such as that the English word ‘parallelepiped’ is composed of four or five grammatical units
(which is the case in Ancient Greek). We must accept, then, that the distinction between “simple”
and “complex” words is difficult to draw.
Complex words are of two major types:
1. words made from a basic word form (which we will call the stem), with the addition of an affix;
and
2. compound words, which are made of two (or occasionally more) independent English (e.g. ‘ice
cream’, ‘armchair’).
We will look first at the words made with affixes. Affixes are of two sorts in English: prefixes,
which come before the stem (e.g. prefix ‘un-’ + stem ‘pleasant’ → ‘unpleasant’) and suffixes, which
come after the stem (e.g. stem ‘good’ + suffix ‘-ness’ → ‘goodness’).
Affixes have one of three possible effects on word stress:
1. The affix itself receives the primary stress (e.g. ‘semi-’ + ‘circle’ s¥+kl → ‘semicircle’ 'semws ¥+kl;
‘-ality’ + person p ¥+sn → ‘personality’ p ¥+ŋ'æl ti).
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2. The word is stressed as if the affix were not there (e.g. ‘pleasant’ 'pleznt, ‘unpleasant’ ' Λ n'pleznt;
‘market’ 'ma+kwt, ‘marketing’ 'ma+kwtwŋ).
3. The stress remains on the stem, not the affix, but is shifted to a different syllable (e.g. ‘magnet’
'mæl'etwk).

26.3 Suffixes
There are so many suffixes that it will only be possible here to examine a small proportion of them:
we will concentrate on those which are common and productive — that is, are applied to a
considerable number of stems and could be applied to more to make new English words. In the
case of the others, foreign learners would probably be better advised to learn the ‘stem + affix’
combination as an indiviudal item.
One of the problems that we encounter is that we find words which are obviously complex but
which, when we try to divide them into stem + affix, turn out to have a stem that is difficult to
imagine as an English word. For example, the word ‘audacity’ seems to be a complex word – but
what is its stem? Another problem is that it is difficult in some cases to know whether a word has
one, or more than one, suffix: for example, should we analyse ‘personality’ from the point of view
of stress assignment as p ¥+sn + æl ti or as p ¥+sn + æl + ti? In the study of English word
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formation at a deeper level than we can go into here, it is necessary for such reasons to distinguish
between a stem (which is what remains when affixes are removed), and a root, which is the

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