Which statement accurately describes derivational and inflectional affixes?

• A. Derivational affixes form new words or relate to the word's meaning; inflectional affixes create different grammatical forms
• B. Derivational affixes mark tense; inflectional affixes mark plurality
• C. Derivational affixes are only prefixes; inflectional affixes are only suffixes
• D. Both types always change the word's pronunciation

Answer: (A)

Understanding how affixes affect word meaning and grammar is the idea here. Derivational affixes attach to a base word to form a new word or to shift its meaning or even its part of speech. They can be prefixes or suffixes, and they’re the tools that create words like happiness from happy, or unknown from known, or teacher from teach. Inflectional affixes, in contrast, don’t create new words or change the basic category of the word. They add grammatical information—tense, number, degree, or possession—so walk becomes walked, cat becomes cats, and big becomes bigger. Because their role is to modify grammatical form rather than vocabulary, this distinction best describes how the two types function. The other ideas either misstate where derivational affixes appear, confuse tense or plurality with derivation, claim all inflections are suffixes, or wrongly assert that both types always change pronunciation.