Note the following word groups:
a) real, book, leaf, letter, tooth, rain;
b) reality, big house, postman, foliage, dentist, drizzle;
c) unhappy, intramuscular, predicting, underground.
Words in group A cannot be reduced to smaller groups of words because they only have one. morphic element, O radical, that is, they have only one nucleus that carries all the meaning of the word that is recognized in the world in which we live.
In group B, it follows the radical a suffix, that is, a morphic element that gives a new idea to the primitive word, changing its grammatical category. Thus, we have: real – adjective; reality – noun.
Finally, in the C group, the radical is preceded by a morphic element called prefix, which gives the root a new meaning, that is, it has more semantic than morphological value and does not modify the grammatical category of the primitive word.
These morphic elements that can have morphological function (suffixes) or semantic function (prefixes) are called affixes in the Portuguese language. See the uses of these affixes below:
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suffixes
- Can change the grammatical category of the radical:
cruel (adjective) – cruelity (substantive)
São Paulo (noun) – paulist (adjective)
remember (verb) – rememberhip (substantive)
kind (adjective) – kindmind (adverb)
- They give the associated word the notion of augmentative and diminutive, of names of agents, of action, of collectives, etc.:
Houseno, roadlittle girl, shoehey, punishdog, oxada, etc.
- Can be nominal suffixes (those that form nouns and adjectives), verbal suffixes (which join the verb) and adverbial suffix (the only one is the suffix -mind)
Prefixes
- Change the root meaning and can be related to the prepositions:
happy - inhappy
per - aboutby (preposition about)
mediate - intermediate (preposition in between)
In this way, prefixes and suffixes are called affixes, where prefixes are the affixes that are added to the beginning of the stem and suffixes are the affixes that are added to the end of the stem.
By Mariana Rigonatto
Graduated in Letters
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
RIGONATTO, Mariana. "What is an affix?"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/o-que-e/portugues/o-que-e-afixo.htm. Accessed on July 27, 2021.
