Prefiksacja

Prefiksacja, or prefixation, is a morphological process in which a bound morpheme called a prefix is added to the beginning of a base word to form a new word or to alter its grammatical category or meaning. It is a widespread mechanism in many language families, including Slavic, Germanic, and Semitic languages, and it is studied as part of affixation in general linguistics.

Prefixes can be derivational, creating a new lexeme or shifting word class (for example a verb gaining a new meaning or an adjective becoming a noun). They can also be inflectional, providing grammatical information such as aspect, tense, number, or direction without changing the base word's class. The effects of prefixation are often systematic but can be highly productive or lexicalized (fossilized) in particular languages.

In many languages, prefixes attach to verbs to form related words with altered aspect, aspectual pairs, or directional meaning, and to nouns and adjectives to derive related terms. A well-known cross-linguistic example is English prefixation with un-, re-, dis- that modifies meaning or part of speech. In Polish and other Slavic languages, prefixes such as od-, prze-, za-, roz- frequently modify verbs to produce new lexical or aspectual meanings, or to indicate movement, completion, or other nuances.

Prefiksacja works together with other word-formation processes, especially suffixation, infixation, and circumfixation, in a language’s overall morphology. It is a central topic in studies of word formation, historical linguistics, and typology, helping explain how languages extend their expressive resources with a relatively small set of affixes.

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