On The Modern Chinese Affixes

This article focuses on the prefixes and suffixes in modern Chinese and proceeds the first step inquisition and analysis. Considering the length of the article and the characteristics of Chinese language, the infixes are not involved in the article, the quantity of which is the little and mostly not typical. Through investigation, the author raises the following points: To start with, presently the Chinese language is still in its seedtime-a developing process, which is regarded as a kind of language mainly with monosyllabic morphemes and deeply separable semantic cognitive characteristics. That is to say, the linguistic element-morpheme we call today, which was used to be a word in old Chinese, has been evolved into bound morpheme and free morpheme in the-process of the evolvement. The meaning of some bound morphemes gradually become empty and, at the same time, the bound morpheme is marking the grammatical function of the word where they are the members. Then the meaningful root changes to the meaningless affix-normally we call it Typical Affix. The Typical Affix mainly includes prefix and suffix and among them the suffix is the majority.The second point is that some affixes were produced through the affection of western languages or the need of translation. We call them quasi-affixes, which reflect the spirit of time of modern Chinese indeed. It is quite obvious that, as affixes, the quasi-affixes are more productive than the typical affixes. And it isimportant to mention that the quasi-affixes are a little bit meaningful and were not evolved from the roots, on the contrary, they are used as affixes directly. Last but not the least, the monosyllabic morphemes of modern Chinese and its unique word-formation make the Chinese morphemes with wide-combination. The wide-combination usually makes the morphemes meaningless and makes the possibility of changing into affixes. That is to say, maybe some of the morphemes result in the wide-combination and functional marker from overabundance; but it is not meaning that all the morpheme with wide-combination is certain to be affix.