Introduction

The term affix that I have considered in this chapter includes all inflectional and derivational elements as well as other formative elements, which play important roles in the formation of words in Bengali. These are the most productive components in the act of generating new words in the language. If the total number of words available in modern Bengali is divided into two types, namely, the non-affixed words and the affixed words, it will be clearly noted that the number of affixed words far exceeds the number of non-affixed words. Due to this fact, these formative elements ask for attention in structural analysis of words in the language.

In a general sense, the list of affix includes the deviational and inflectional elements, which are tagged with root, stems or bases to generate new derived and inflected words, respectively. While the derivational affixes generally take part in the formation of new verbs, nouns, and adjectives, inflectional affixes are mostly used in formation of inflected nouns, pronouns, and conjugated verb forms. That means derivational affixes are mostly operative within the parts of speech of verbs, nouns, and adjectives, while inflectional affixes are mostly operative within the part of speech of nouns, pronouns, and verbs. Words belonging to other parts of speech such as, postposition, demonstrative, adverb, and indeclinable do not normally use affixes to form new words in the language.

Although affixes are considered dependent morphemes, these are productive in the sense that these are regularly tagged with stems, bases, and words to form new words in a language (Spencer, 1991).