Derivational Morphology in L2 English: Investigating the Role of Affixal Neutrality Through the Lens of Linguistic Theory

Abstract

This study investigates how second language (L2) learners acquire morphologically com- plex English words, focusing on affixal neutrality—whether suffixes preserve the phono- logical form and semantic transparency of the base (e.g., -ness in happiness) or trigger phonological/orthographic changes (e.g., -ity in activity). Drawing on linguistic theo- ries of morphological decomposition and lexical representation, we examine how this property influences different dimensions of derivational knowledge. Fifty-four Mandarin- speaking secondary school EFL learners completed three receptive tasks targeting relational knowledge (morphological relatedness), syntactic knowledge (category awareness), an..