NEGATIVE-ADJECTIVE-FORMING AFFIXATION IN DER SPIEGEL MAGAZINE: A MORPHO-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

Morphology is a branch of linguistics that deals with word formation. One of the research studies in morphological analysis is affixation. Affixation is the addition of a bound morpheme to a free morpheme, which can change the lexical content of the morpheme. In German, negation can be attached to verbs, nouns, and adjectives by adding the affix. This study entitled Negative-adjective-forming affixation in DER SPIEGEL magazine is a morpho-semantic analysis whose purpose is to find the negative affixes, analyze the morphological process in word formation, and finally classify the negative adjectives according to the semantic classification. This study is a qualitative study and records the derivational patterns of word formation based on the theory of Bünting (1996) and the semantic classification of adjectives according to Duden (2009) for analysis. The data used in this study was collected from the magazine DER SPIEGEL. The data collection procedures are as follows: Identifying the attached negative adjectives, analyzing the word formation, classifying the adjectives semantically and lastly summarizing or drawing the conclusion from the collected and analyzed data. The analysis shows that (1) there is the prefix un- in-/il-/ir- a-, des-/dis- and the suffix -los, which can negate adjectives; (2) the lexical meaning of the root word most often remains unchanged in the derivation; (3) the adjectives to which negative affixes are attached can be semantically divided into four categories: adjectival participles, qualifying adjectives, relational adjectives, and numeral adjectives.

Keywords: adjectives, affixation, morpho-semantics, negation