Hi, S_D. Prefixes and suffixes taken together (along with infixes) are called affixes in morphology, which is a sub-field in linguistics. Linguists usually distinguish between inflectional morphology (like making a regular verb a past tense by adding -ed or making a noun plural by adding -(e)s) and derivational morphology. The latter is usually much less productive, i.e., can't be done all the time, than the former. Derivational morphology also usually changes the syntactic category (i.e., the part of speech) of the word the affix is attached to, e.g., warmth from warm + -th). Sometimes, other bits of words get reanalysed and start becoming affix-like: e.g., the all-purpose -gate (from Watergate) attached to many scandal names). What you're talking about in your question isn't really afixing, but more about word compounding. Some languages really go to town, Sankrit and German being the usually mentioned ones. Whether the truck in truck driver is a noun or an adjective is the stuff that theses are made on. In English we have many compounds made of all all sorts of parts of speech: adj + N (blackbird, blueberry), N + N (babysitter, bookkeeper; which may lead to N + V by back formation, to babysit, to bookkeep), adj + adj (blue green, light grey), etc. Hope this helps.
