These words are complex words because they can be broken down into two morphological constituents. A complex word can be broken down if there are two morphemes that can stand alone and have meaning on their own. “Forbid” and all these other words that begin with “for” are complex seeing as how the “for” can be divided from the second half of the word. However, I do see how these can possibly be simplex words because while “for” is a word itself, it cannot really stand alone because the word is always followed by another word. “For” was made to be used as a prefix. From last week’s class I took notice that suffixes can be included in complex words and considered a morphological constituent. For example, “eater” was used as an example to introduce the difference between simplex and complex words. This was considered a complex word because of the morphological constituent “er.”  If suffixes and affixes are included when determining complex words, then I believe prefixes can be as well.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.