Suffix

Description

A suffix (also sometimes termed 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. 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 (e.g., English -like or German -freundlich 'friendly').

Productivity

Suffixes can carry grammatical information (inflectional suffixes) or lexical information (derivational/lexical suffixes). An inflectional suffix is sometimes called a desinence or a grammatical suffix.

Examples

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.

Inflectional suffixes

Inflection changes the 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.

Inflectional suffixes do not change the word class of the word after inflection. Inflectional suffixes in modern English include:

-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

Derivation

Derivational suffixes can be divided into two categories: class-changing derivation and class-maintaining derivation. In English, they include

-ise/-ize (usually changes nouns into verbs)

-fy (usually changes nouns into verbs)

-ly (usually changes adjectives into adverbs)

-ful (usually changes nouns into adjectives)

-able/-ible (usually changes verbs into adjectives)

-hood (usually class-maintaining, with the word class remaining a noun)

-ess (usually class-maintaining, with the word class remaining a noun)

-ness (usually changes adjectives into nouns)

-less (usually changes nouns into adjectives)

-ism (usually class-maintaining, with the word class remaining a noun)

-ment (usually changes verbs into nouns)

-ist (usually class-maintaining, with the word class remaining a noun)

-al (usually changes nouns into adjectives)

-ish (usually changes nouns into adjectives/ class-maintaining, with the word class remaining an adjective)

-tion (usually changes verbs into noun)

-logy/-ology (usually class-maintaining, with the word class remaining a noun)

Examples

-oid

-like

Synthetic languages

Many synthetic languages—Czech, German, Finnish, Latin, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, etc.—use a large number of endings.