Affixation derivation of russian nouns

Abstract

The paper presents an attempt at reviewing the relationship between subsystems of the Russian morphology. The features that allow to delineate word derivation, infl ection and derivation of word forms are described and the formal criterion of their demarcation is offered. In the process of word derivation with suffi xes a new part of speech is formed (or, more precisely, the syntactic function of the word changes and this leads to the change of the part of speech). Infl ection does not require any changes in the syntactic function and part of speech. The paper presents a defi nition of a grammatical form derivation – an affi xation derivation which marks grammatical categories of a particular part of speech and creates subparadigms of a morphological word. The author analyses counter-examples and explains their existence by the necessity to take into account the heterogeneous nature of the modern word derivation system in Russian, as it includes relatively independent interacting subsystems: the original subsystem of the affi xation of appelatives (the regularities of which are being analysed), the international subsystem of affi xation and the subsystem of onym affi xation.