Abstract: Abstract:
After reviewing the studies on English negative prefixes and on the basis of The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this paper mainly researches online adjectives with either “less ”or “free” as suffixes to induce the derivative mechanism and to explore the distinct meanings of the derived adjectives sharing both suffixes. Findings show that the two suffixes are attached to nouns alone and semantic restrictions are imposed on the nouns. Some rare linguistic data are googled on the Internet to verify the validity and productivity of the suffixes by deducing the wordformation rule, which can be a reflection of human thinking style.

Key words: negative suffix, derivative mechanism, semantic restriction, distinctive meaning