A Brief Investigation into the Affix of

A Brief Investigation into the A ffix of “D irection” in English

As defined in Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, Affix is a letter or group of letters added to the beginning or end of a word to change its meaning. The two primary kinds of affixation are prefixation (the addition of a prefix) and suffixation (the addition of a suffix). Affixes are forms that are attached to words or word elements to modify meaning or function. All affixes are bound morphemes. Clusters of affixes can be used to form complex words, but we still can find some rules to follow. Now, I’m going to make a brief investigation into the affix of “direction” in English.

When we talk about the prefix of “direction” in English, everyone can think of in- or inter-, however, there are so many affixes of “direction” that we are not familiar with. For example, pro- is an affix, which is used to express the meaning of forward or front. “Progress, prologue, protraction, promote and so on, these words are the cases of this type of affix of “direction”. Besides, the affix means “return and backward” still existed in English. The most important representative of the affix is “re-”, there are a lot of words combine with re-, such as return, recall and regress.

Noun of locality are not just front and back, but also top and bottom. The affix super- is a bound morpheme that combines with a noun such as stratum meaning “upper layer”, giving an adjective aqueous meaning “on water”. How about the affix under-? It’s very easy to find it expresses the meaning of bottom, for example, when we combine under- with the noun world, it can be used to describe the people and activities involved in crime in a particular place. Then, underfoot, underline and underwrite are other representatives of the affix under-.

Now let us consider this question: when we want to express the thing in the internal position, can we explain it by combining with an a ffix of “Direction”? I would say the answer is absolutely yes. The example of Intra- is a good one, for instance, Intrapersonal, intraparty, intraregional and so on.

All in all, without doubt, the investigation of the a ffix of “d irection” in English is useful for we English learners to remember words and even good for further research.