In The Modern Chinese Word Formation Affixes Tendency

Modern Chinese has little morphological process, and compound is the main way of its word-formation. Less attention is paid to derivation, compared with compound construction. In the last ten years, with the appearing of a large number of new words, affix trend occurs in radical morphemes. This phenomenon has been noticed and studies have been made to some degree.With the development of Chinese affix studying, more and more people start to study the affix trend. From 1980s', the study of the affix trend is often combined with new words. The focus are describing and analyzing the characteristics of quasi-affixes. As a state between root and affix, quasi-affixes has large mutation. The mutation induces the unclearness of quasi-affixes' feature, which is hard to be mastered and not easy to define.This paper combines describe-analysis with statistics-analysis. First of all, we conclude the characteristics of affix, which are: place-stabilizing; adhering; morpheme's becoming empty; signing syntactical functions and morphological features that help to determine a part of speech; not being words. We define typical affixes according to these characteristics, and make a detail analysis on three levels of affix—"old". This is our innovation.