Germanic affixoids in Jacob Grimm

Douglas Lightfoot
The University of Alabama

Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) is one of the best-known German linguists of the early nineteenth-century. His influential volume, Deutsche Grammatik (1826, part two), deals with German word-formation. That work comments on the development of derivational affixes from former words, and thus contributes to affixoid studies. Much current work on affixoids utilizes Stevens’ (2005) criteria to determine whether an affixoid is on hand, and this paper thus uses Stevens’ work as a backdrop to situate Grimm’s related theoretical claims. A number of Grimm’s claims support current linguistic theory on affixoids, and several claims appear to offer fruitful insights for further investigation.

Publication history

Date received: 7 August 2024

Date accepted: 9 June 2025

Published online: 11 July 2025

Table of contents

This article highlights contributions from the work of Jacob Grimm (1826) to research on the development of what are understood as affixoids in Germanic languages, principally from the developing German language. Affixoidal phenomena and their place in scholarship are first introduced. Statements from Grimm are then presented, and discussion connects Grimm’s ideas with relatively recent theorizing on suffixoids and prefixoids.

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