Russian

Abstract

This article presents an outline of Russian word-formation along with the history of studies on this topic. It contains data on essential meanings conveyed by models of Russian word-formation. Word-formation is one of the most frequent means of enriching the vocabulary, even more so than lexical borrowing. The main mechanism is affixation. The type and frequency of affixes may vary with word class: while nouns tend to add suffixes, verbs are more prone to prefixation. Composition is relatively common, though characteristic only of nominal word-formation.