inflectional affixes and derivational affixes

Derivational Affixes

An affix can be either derivational or inflectional. "Derivational affixes"
serve to alter the meaning of a word by building on a base. In the
examples of words with prefixes and suffixes above, the addition of the
prefix un- to healthy alters the meaning of healthy. The resulting word
means "not healthy." The addition of the suffix -er to garden changes
the meaning of garden, which is a place where plants, flowers, etc., grow,
to a word that refers to 'a person who tends a garden.' It should be noted
that ALL prefixes in English are derivational. However, suffixes may be
either derivational or inflectional.

Inflectional Affixes

There are a large number of derivational affixes in English. In contrast,
there are only eight "inflectional affixes" in English, and these are all
suffixes. English has the following inflectional suffixes, which serve a
variety of grammatical functions when added to specific types of words.
These grammatical functions are shown to the right of each suffix.

-s noun plural
-'s noun possessive
-s verb present tense third person singular
-ing verb present participle/gerund
-ed verb simple past tense
-en verb past perfect participle
-er adjective comparative
-est adjective superlative

thanks a lot

You're welcome, xiaowangshu.

From "health" to "healthy", this "y" is a morpheme or not?

You mean students of English have to learn this stuff? Gee whizz.

I doubt it, for native speakers, at least. There is a great deal of language which children intuit, and English is taught to native speakers both in ways which assume this (by the time a child is in elementary school, he or she knows that a gardener is one who gardens, and a rower is one who rows), and in ways which don't use references to obscure professional jargon. Children are not taught about "affixes" when they learn, for example, comparatives of adjectives--light, lighter and lightest follow a rule and employ those "affixes," but bad, worse and worst don't follow that rule, nor use those "affixes."

These kinds of things will be important to non-native speakers of English, and the more so if their native language is not of a European origin. I personally would consider them worse than useless for a native English speaking child in elementary school. For such a child they would be obscure and confusing.

Ditto that, with knobs on.

This takes us into the aerie heights inhabited by you-know-who and a few others, where all sense and reason are lost.

The acquisition of language in small children can be quite amazing. Children of three or four years of age will make intelligent mistakes. A child who says "And then, he shooted him" is making an intelligent mistake. She knows, without even being aware of the fact, that the past tense is uaually formed by adding the "-ed" sound to the basic verb form. There's a lot you don't need to teach children, or which simply needs some basic fine tuning.

Students of English as a second language, though, and especially those who don't speak any other European language or use an alphabet are going to need a lot of help and explanation. The native speaker of French may need to learn to add "-ed" to verb forms, but they are already familiar with altering basic verb forms in a standard manner, and in English it's child's playl compared to the thre major infinitive forms and the irregular verbs in French. So, the native speakers of European languages have advantages (evven if they don't recognize it) over learners of English who native languages are profoundly dissimilar.

thanx it is very helpful for me,,

what is the similar between derivational and inflectional affixes

What about some of the odd noun plurals such as -en for oxen and -I for nouns ending in -us such as platypi? Are these also inflectional affixes?

Inflectional and derivational affixes are the two types of bound morphemes.Inflectional morphemes are those bound morpheme that causes changes to the grammatical aspect of a word without changing its word class.Examples include the word teacher inflected to get the plural form teachers still maintaining its word class"NOUN".Derivational affixes are rose that may be added to the root word to derive a new word and also often changes the grammatical class.Example a "teacher "was derived from the word "teach".Teacher is a now whilst teach is a verb.

Finally, all the things I taught Setanta are starting to sink in.

Back to work on Baldimo, McTag and coldjoint.

the 'y' in unhealthy is a morphine but u should know that we have two types of morphine which are bound and free morphine. free morphine are those that can stand on its own and have meaning like ( cat, car, pen). bound morphine are that has to be attached to an original to generate meaning e.g -ly, -er, -y, -tion, -ed