Over the 1500 years’ development of English language, its words have greatly reduced their structural changes and gradually developed into a state approaching to the characteristics of Sino-Tibetan family of languages, taking Chinese as an example. Among the languages in Indo-European language family, all of them have some family resemblances but English is the only language system that has never gone through morphological changes on adjectives. The typical changes in English vocabulary are only limited in nouns, pronouns and verbs, which are often realized by word-formation, say, word affixation.

English vocabulary is composed by a big range of words. It is one of the richest and the most extensive wordage in the world. One reason for that is that after having centuries of cultural infiltration, it has collected and ‘colonized’ a great number of non-native items into its own pocket. Actually, among the entire English lexicon, native English words only account for a corner of the iceberg even though they are the core system of English language. Another reason for such a large and rich storage is because of its inner structures. After continually restructured by various word elements, new words are constantly emerging. Given an example of a prefix, a-, we can make no effort to recreate such words like await, aside, ashore, anew, ascend and amass. Affixes are the ones that make words either functional or polysemous, which embodies the quality of productivity. Thus, it can be concluded that word affixation stressed an important role in English development.

2.1 Development of English Affixation

Ferdinand de Sassure (1857-1913), known as “the father of modern linguistics”, once put forward his original ideas on linguistic field. His unique perspective on analyzing languages is especially appreciated and it is well accepted that the research on English affixes and English affixation can be attempted with the help of his thought. In other words, as the change of affixes contains both static and dynamic features, it is liable to identify this linguistic system based on two aspects which Sassure once put forward — synchronic analysis and diachronic analysis (c.f. Saussure: 1907).

The development of vocabulary in modern English is typically carried out through three channels, resting on creating new words, adopting a new sense of an old word and borrowing foreign words. The ancient only mastered quite small range of words because of the geographical restriction and their thought patterns. It is obvious that yes and no are the most basic words to show someone’s feeling in conversation. If a person wants to express his/her opposition, they may use a direct no- or not- form, such as not happy, not satisfied, both of which meet ‘a same sense secondary word + a chief word’ standard. This mindset of language user marks the beginning of affix utilization. After having been used for several times, such words were known to the public and became common words. However, this way of word forming has not classified by the ancestors at that time. They did not come up with a term for it and have not formed a regulation. Until now, word creation is still available through this forming pattern. Linguists in early stage called these word elements ‘affixes’. Almost all the affixes are bound morphemes in respect that they can hardly exist as independent elements. According to the varying functions in constructing new words, affixes are pided into two major packets: inflectional affixes and derivational affixes. New words are made by attaching different affixes to another independent word element like a root, which is considered the dominant way in new words creation, known as ‘affixation’.

Diachronic study puts more emphasis on the change of affix with the change of ages. In order to   operate transformational derivation, any language in the world can be converted by some inner factors such as grammar, word meaning, context and other external factors like the cultural infiltration from various regions and the inherent connection among different languages, to name just a few. During the period of ancient society, there were some unshaped affix regulations, in a way of putting various affixes together, starting to take effect. For instance, Englisc, which denotes the language of Angles, and Englaland, which refers to the land of the Angles at the early stage. As the evolvement on the pronunciation and spelling in the inner part of language, finally these two terms came to be English and England.