Suprafix

In linguistics, a suprafix is a type of affix that gives a suprasegmental pattern (such as tone, stress, or nasalization) to either a neutral base or a base with a preexisting suprasegmental pattern. This affix will, then, convey a derivational or inflectional meaning. This suprasegmental pattern acts like segmental phonemes within a morpheme; the suprafix is a combination of suprasegmental phonemes, organized into a pattern, that creates a morpheme. For example, a number of African languages express tenseaspect distinctions by tone. English has a process of changing stress on verbs to create nouns. Driven by structural linguists in the United States, the suprafix was more frequently used by such linguists during the time of American structuralism. The idea of suprasegmental morphemes was introduced in Eugene Nida's morphology textbook, where he suggested the term, suprafix, to account for these kinds of morphemes; the term was adopted by George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith Jr. in their paper on the structure of English. It was further described in Edith Trager's article on the suprafix in English verbal compounds and in Archibald A. Hill's introductory linguistics of English text. Later, it was taken up in Peter Matthews' influential morphology textbook. Some linguists prefer superfix, which was introduced by George L. Trager for the stress pattern of a word, which he regarded as a special morpheme that combines and unifies the parts of a word. Another term that has not been widely adopted, but has been suggested to replace suprafix or superfix, is simulfix. This word has been offered as a replacement term because many linguists have noted that the addition of suprasegmental phonemes is added neither above nor below the segmental phonemes; instead it is affixed altogether. However, a simulfix has been used to describe different morphological phenomena and, therefore, has not been adopted for the purposes defined here. There are two different types of suprafixes: additive and replacive.