Word formation is the process by which new words are formed from the elements of other existing words. Many words can be broken up into smaller parts (morphemes). The study of word formation is known as morphology.
Look at the word happiness
It is formed from the adjective happy and the suffix -ness (and changing the -y to -i).
We can also change the word happy in other ways:
• we can make it negative by adding a prefix (-un): unhappy
• we can make it into an adverb by adding a suffix (-ily): Happily/ Unhappily
Happy is the root word and can therefore exist as a word on its own but suffixes cannot exist on their own.
We use the term word family to talk about the different words that are created with a root word, usually by adding affixes (prefixes and suffixes).
Ability is part of a word family that includes:
- Adjectives
- able, unable
- Adverbs
- ably
- Nouns
- inability, disability
- Verbs
- enable, disable
There are some common suffixes that we can teach students in order to help them to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words, as well as to form new words:
• Nouns often end: -ence, -ion, -ity, -ment, -ness
• People nouns often end: -er, -ian, -ist, -or
• Adjectives often end: -able, -al, -ed, -ible, -ic, -ive, -ing, -y
• Some verbs end: -ate, -en, -ise
• Adverbs often end: -ly
Task 11
Read the text below and use the words in brackets (1-8) to form a word that fits in each of the numbered gaps. There is an example at the beginning (0).
The First Coffee Shops
There is some (0) …………………… (history) evidence to suggest that coffee was cultivated in Africa in the tenth century, but drinking coffee didn’t become (1) …………………… (fashion) in Europe until the mid seventeenth century, with many visitors to London claiming that going to a coffee shop was one of the great (2) …………………… (please) of life. People paid an (3) …………………… (admit) charge of one penny to enter a coffee shop, to enjoy the supposedly (4) ……………………(benefit) effects of the drink. Doctors at the time believed it could cure several diseases, and many drinkers reported that coffee made them more (5) …………………… (energy) and improved their mood. (6) …………………… (increase), a visit to a coffee shop had a serious purpose too, as people started to meet there to discuss politics and new ideas. Good behaviour was essential and if you were (7) …………………… (polite), you could be thrown out of a shop. However, coffee shops in Europe declined in popularity in the late eighteenth century due to the greater (8) …………………… (consume) of tea, a drink that was easier to make than coffee.
