In linguistics, a suffix (also sometimes called a postfix or ending) 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. Particularly in the study of Semitic languages, a suffix is called an afformative, as they can alter the form of the words to which they are fixed. In Indo-European studies, a distinction is made between suffixes and endings (see Proto-Indo-European root). A word-final segment that is somewhere between a free morpheme and a bound morpheme is known as a suffixoid[1] or a semi-suffix[2] (e.g., English -like or German -freundlich 'friendly').
Suffixes can carry grammatical information (inflectional suffixes). (derivational suffixes). An inflectional suffix is sometimes called a desinence.[3]
Some examples in European languages:
Many synthetic languages—Czech, German, Finnish, Latin, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, etc.—use a large number of endings.
Suffixes used in English frequently have Greek, French or Latin origins.
Contents |
Inflection changes grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. In the example:
the suffix -ed inflects the root-word clear to indicate past tense. Some inflectional suffixes in present day English:
In the example:
the suffix -ly modifies the root-word clear from an adjective into an adverb. Derivation can also form a semantically distinct word within the same syntactic category. In this example:
the suffix -ish modifies the root-word clear, changing its meaning to "clear, but not very clear".
Some derivational suffixes in present day English: