Suffix


In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. An inflectional suffix is sometimes called a desinence or a grammatical suffix or ending. Inflection changes the grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. Derivational suffixes can be divided into two categories: class-changing derivation and class-maintaining derivation.
Particularly in the study of Semitic languages, suffixes are called afformatives, as they can alter the form of the words. In Indo-European studies, a distinction is made between suffixes and endings. Suffixes can carry grammatical information or lexical information.

Description

A suffix is an affix that is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs.
Particularly in Semitic languages, a suffix is called an afformative, as it can alter the form of the words. In Indo-European studies, a distinction is made between suffixes and endings.
A word-final segment that is somewhere between a free morpheme and a bound morpheme is known as a suffixoid or a semi-suffix.

Productivity

Suffixes can carry grammatical information or lexical information.'' An inflectional suffix is sometimes called a desinence or a grammatical suffix.

Examples

English

French

German

Russian

Inflectional suffixes

changes the grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. In the example:
the suffix -ed inflects the root-word fade to indicate past participle.
Inflectional suffixes do not change the word class of the word after the inflection. Inflectional suffixes in Modern English include:

Verbs

suffixes can be divided into two categories: class-changing derivation and class-maintaining derivation. In English, they include
Many synthetic languages—Czech, German, Finnish, Latin, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, etc.—use many endings.