This paper aimed to explore derivational affixes, more specifically the types of derivational affixes and the functions of the derivational affixes in the story of Winter Break, which was written by Hilary Mantel. The exploration of the affixes is important to conduct because it would assist learners of English in enriching their vocabulary items. This study was quantitative descriptive. The researchers collected complex words from the story and analyzed their derivational affixes. Results showed that there existed 54 occurrences of words containing derivational affixes. 3 of the 54 words contained 3 types of prefixes, namely in-, un-, pre-, and the remaining 51 words contained 20 suffixes such as -er, -ed, -y, -ly, -ion, -hood, -ment, -al, -ing, -tion, -ish, -ness, -ous, -ity, -ful, -ary, -age, -cal, -less, -able.

Four functions of derivational affixes were identified in the short story of Winter Break, namely, noun formation with 16 occurrences (29.6%), adjective formation with 24 occurrences (44.4%), adverb formation with 13 occurrences (24.1) and verb formation with only 1 occurrence (1.9%). Because the Winter Break narrative uses a lot of noun descriptions, which means that adjectives are employed to modify nouns, the adjective construction occurred the most frequently. The verb formation is the least common as the majority of the verbs in the Winter Break story are past tense; as a result, these verbs are categorized as inflectional affixes rather than derivational verbs, which is beyond the purview of this study.

Derivational affix, prefix, suffix

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