Affiksisen

Affiksisen is a term used in linguistics to describe the systematic process of forming or modifying words by attaching affixes. It encompasses prefixation, suffixation, infixation, and circumfixation, and includes related morphophonological phenomena that accompany affix attachment. Affixes, which are bound morphemes, attach to bases such as stems or roots and encode information about meaning, part of speech, tense, number, mood, case, voice, or aspect. The process can be derivational, producing new lexical items, or inflectional, marking grammatical categories without creating new words. Productivity varies across languages and affixes; some are highly productive and can form many new words, while others are restricted.

Affiksisen patterns interact with phonology. In many languages, affixes trigger phonological changes at word boundaries, may involve vowel harmony, assimilations, or consonant alternations. Morphological order and allomorphy also play roles, with affixes appearing in predictable or irregular shapes depending on the surrounding sounds and the base.

Linguistic typology highlights different affixation systems: agglutinative languages rely on a sequence of clear affixes for grammatical information; fusional languages combine affix vowels and consonants more variably; isolating languages use limited affixation. Affiksisen is a central topic in historical linguistics, comparative morphology, and computational linguistics, informing dictionaries, grammar descriptions, and morphological analyzers. Examples across languages include prefixing, suffixing, infixing, and circumfixing patterns observed in English, Turkish, Finnish, and other language families.