Word family

A word family is the base form of a word plus its inflected forms and derived forms made with suffixes and prefixes plus its cognates, i.e. all words that have a common etymological origin, some of which even native speakers don't recognize as being related (e.g. "wrought (iron)" and "work(ed)"). In the English language, inflectional affixes include third person -s, verbal -ed and -ing, plural -s, possessive -s, comparative -er and superlative -est. Derivational affixes include -able, -er, -ish, -less, -ly, -ness, -th, -y, non-, un-, -al, -ation, -ess, -ful, -ism, -ist, -ity, -ize/-ise, -ment, in-. The idea is that a base word and its inflected forms support the same core meaning, and can be considered learned words if a learner knows both the base word and the affix. Bauer and Nation proposed seven levels of affixes based on their frequency in English. It has been shown that word families can assist with deriving related words via affixes, along with decreasing the time needed to derive and recognize such words.

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