Delahunty and Garvey
-ude gratitude
table 2: common noun-forming derivational suffixes
Exercise
Why do you think English has so many different noun-forming deriva-
tional suffixes? (Hint: look up several of them in a large dictionary.)
A common role of derivational morphemes in a language is to change
words of one part of speech into related words of another part of speech. Thus
the verb tolerate becomes the noun toleration; likewise, the verb act becomes
the adjective active, which becomes the noun activity, by the addition of their
respective suffixes. Sometimes derivation will change a word to a different
subclass of the same part of speech, with a different, though related mean-
ing. For example, the suffix {-hood} turns the noun knight into the noun
knighthood, just as {-dom} turns the noun king into the noun kingdom. As we
mentioned, only the final derivational suffix on a word determines its part of
speech: disestablishmentarianism contains four suffixes; the last, {-ism}, makes
it a noun. (Plural and genitive inflections may follow the derivational suffix
without affecting Test 2.)
Derivational suffixes are less useful than inflections as clues to nouns be-
cause of their limited productivity, that is, how freely they may be added
to words: {-er}, {-ness} and {-ity} are relatively productive noun-forming suf-
fixes; we could, for example, add {-er} to a newly minted verb, e.g., to iPod
to create the noun iPodder. On the other hand, the {-th} suffix in depth can
no longer be used to derive nouns from adjectives; *lowth from low + th, cf.
height from high + th (the spelling is misleading here). (See Bauer 1983, 1988;
Huddleston and Pullum 2002; Quirk, Greenbaum Leech and Svartvik 1972
for discussions of productivity.)
Moreover, as you know, English allows zero derivation (conversion, cat-
egory change, and functional shift), by which a word’s grammatical category
may be changed without any change of form, such as the addition of a deri-
vational suffix. Thus the verb trade has been converted to the noun trade, as
illustrated by the ability of the latter to accept the plural inflection (trades). As
a result of zero derivation, there will be many derived nouns that have no deri-
vational endings. Such forms may appear to students to possess the semantic
characteristics associated with their original class. For instance, the noun kick
will (accurately) seem to name an action rather than a person, place, or thing.