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both for language studies and research work. Compare: womanly
(used in a complimentary manner about girls and women) –
womanish (used to indicate an effeminate man and certainly
implies criticism); starry (resembling stars) – starred (covered or
decorated with stars).
There are a few roots in English which have developed a
great combining ability in the position of the second element of a
word and a very general meaning similar to that of an affix. These
are semi-affixes because semantically, functionally, structurally
and stylistically they behave more like affixes than like roots,
determining the lexical and grammatical class the word belongs to
(e.g. -man: cameraman, seaman; -land: Scotland, motherland; -
like: ladylike, flowerlike; -worthy: trustworthy, praiseworthy; -
proof: waterproof, bullet-proof, etc.)
2. According to their position affixational morphemes fall
into suffixes – derivational morphemes following the root and
forming a new derivative in a different part of speech or a different
word class (writer, rainy, magnify, etc.), infexes – affixes placed
within the word (e.g. adapt-a-tion, assimila-tion, sta-n-d etc.), and
prefixes – derivational morphemes that precede the root and
modify the meaning (e.g. decipher, illegal, unhappy, etc.)
3. From structural point of view it is presupposed that
morphemes fall into three types: free morphemes which can stand
alone as words in isolation (e.g. friendly, friendship); bound
morphemes that occur only as word constituents (e.g. resist,
deceive, misinterpret, etc.); semi-bound morphemes which can
function both as affixes and as free morphemes (compare, e.g.
well-known, herself, after-thought and well, self, after).
In modern English there are many morphemes of Greek and
Latin origin possessing a definite lexical meaning though not used
autonomously, e.g. tele- “far” (television), -scope
“seeing”(microscope), -graph ‘writing”(typography). Such
morphemes are called combining forms – bound linguistic forms
though in Greek and Latin they functioned as independent words.

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