Suffix

In linguistics, a suffix (also sometimes called a postfix or ending or (especially in older literature) affix) 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) or lexical information (derivational suffixes). An inflectional suffix is sometimes called a desinence.^[3]

Some examples in European languages:

Girls, where the suffix -s marks the plural.

He makes, where suffix -s marks the third person singular present tense.

It closed, where the suffix -ed marks the past tense.

De beaux jours, where the suffix -x marks the plural.

Elle est passablement jolie, where the suffix -e marks the feminine form of the adjective.

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.

Inflection changes grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. In the example:

I was hoping the cloth wouldn't fade, but it has faded quite a bit.

the suffix -ed inflects the root-word fade to indicate past tense.

Some inflectional suffixes in present day English:

• -s third person singular present
• -ed past tense
• -t past tense
• -ing progressive/continuous
• -en past participle
• -s plural
• -en plural (irregular)
• -er comparative
• -est superlative
• -n't negative

Some derivational suffixes in modern English:

• -ize/-ise
• -fy
• -ly
• -ful
• -able/-ible
• -hood
• -ess
• -ness
• -less
• -ism
• -ment
• -ist
• -al
• -ish
• -tion
• -ology

References