Préfixação

Préfixação is a morphological process in linguistics where a prefix is added to the beginning of a word to alter its meaning or grammatical function. Prefixes are morphemes, the smallest meaningful units of language, that are bound, meaning they cannot stand alone as words. When a prefix attaches to a base word, it creates a new word, often called a derived word.

This process is common across many languages, including Portuguese, English, and Spanish. For example, in Portuguese, the prefix "in-" can be added to "feliz" to create "infeliz," meaning unhappy. Similarly, in English, "un-" added to "happy" creates "unhappy." The prefix can change the word's meaning in various ways, such as negation (e.g., "des-" in "desfazer"), intensification (e.g., "re-" in "refazer" meaning to do again), or indicating direction or location.

The classification of prefixes can vary, but they are generally considered either derivational or inflectional. Derivational prefixes change the meaning of the base word and can sometimes change its word class (e.g., verb to noun). Inflectional prefixes, though less common in some languages, modify the grammatical properties of a word without significantly altering its core meaning or word class. The study of préfixação is crucial for understanding word formation and the semantic relationships between words within a language.