A Diachronic Study on the Semantic Diffusion of the English Prefixes out- and e(x)-

The purpose of this study is to examine the Germanic prefix out- and the Latin prefix e(x)- from the diachronic point of view. The two prefixes are heterogeneous, but are members of the parent language called the primitive Indo-European. From the Middle English period when the two prefixes coexisted, they became morphosemantic variations. To carry out the research in detail, the prefixes out- and e(x)- are divided into three forms: out-¹, out-², out-³ and e(x)-¹, e(x)-², e(x)-³. This study provides a comparative analysis of the prefixes out- and e(x)- and describes systematically their semantic diffusion process.