Our language is incredibly diverse, but have you ever wondered how it grows? Where do new words come from? Sometimes they get into the Russian language from other languages, they are called borrowed. And sometimes native speakers themselves create new words using various methods.
Have you ever met the term "interfix", raised your eyebrows in surprise and strained your brain, trying to remember what interfix is, and did you meet this word at school in Russian lessons? This article answers many of your questions related to this diverse and amazing part of the word.
Interfix - what is it?
Derived from the Latin inter - "between" and fīxus - "attached". Interfix is a part that serves to form new words. With this affix, two roots are connected or, quite rarely, a root and a suffix.
The term "interfix" is rarely used in school, "connecting vowels" are preferred there. However, this term coversnot all interfixes. Most often, this concept means only such vowels as O and E. Interfix is only partly connecting vowels.
Affix - a part of a word that joins the root and introduces a new grammatical or derivational meaning (prefix, postfix, confix, inflection).
What are interfixes?
The most common interfixes in Russian are E and O. But besides them, there are others in Russian: U, I, A, IM, UX, EX, W, Y, L, V. Examples of words with interfixes: self-o-years, birds-e-catching, two-u-composite, six-and-story, sum-a-descended, uv-im-ets, two-hour, three-ex-story, coffee-th-ny, fit-l-ische, p-in-ets
It is difficult to talk about how many interfixes there are in Russian, because there are an incredible number of them. This article presents only the most common ones. Sometimes interfixes are used only once, for only one word.
Is an interfix a morpheme?
The question of the possibility of highlighting insignificant intermorphemic segments in words is one of the main questions of the morphemic division of a word. In linguistic literature, such meaningless elements are called interfixes. The term "interfix" was proposed by Alexei Mikhailovich Sukhotin, and is accepted in most works on word formation. The works of linguist and professor of philological sciences Elena Andreevna Zemskaya, in which great attention is paid to insignificant intermorphemic segments, contributed to the popularizationthis term.
Interfix is the smallest part of a word that has no meaning. It performs only a connecting function, unlike prefixes, postfixes and confixes, which carry a certain semantic load in the composition of the word. And if you put interfixes on a par with meaningful morphemes, then the term "morpheme" (the smallest meaningful part of a word) loses its meaning. Tikhonov in his works emphasizes that with the possibility of the existence of asematic affixes…
the concept of a morpheme splits, the boundaries of a morpheme become indefinite and vague.
The lack of meaning of interfixes is easy to prove by comparing the same derivational form, which is sometimes expressed with the help of an interfix, and sometimes without it. For example: purr and meow.
The words "purr" and "meow" refer to the same type of word formation, but the absence of the connection -ly- in the word "meow" and its presence in the word "purr" does not affect the meaning at all. This part has no share in the sense of the word.
