Affiksit

Affiksit are bound morphemes that attach to a word to modify its meaning or grammatical function. Unlike free morphemes, affixes cannot stand alone and must be joined to a base form, such as a root or stem.

There are several types of affixes. Prefixes attach at the beginning of a word (for example, un- in unenlightened). Suffixes attach at the end (for example, -ing or -ed in walking or walked). Infixes insert inside a word (found in some languages, such as Tagalog). Circumfixes surround a word with elements before and after the stem (as in certain Germanic and Afroasiatic patterns, e.g., ge- ... -t in German participles). Affixes can also be clitic-like, behaving somewhat like independent words in syntax or phonology.

Affixes serve two broad functions. Derivational affixes create new words and can change part of speech or lexical category (for example, teachable, happiness). Inflectional affixes mark grammatical features such as tense, number, case, mood, or agreement without typically changing the word’s basic category (for example, dogs, walked, quickly). Some languages combine several features into a single affix, while others attach many separate affixes in a chain.

Languages differ in their use of affixes. Agglutinative languages (such as Turkish) use many clear, single-feature affixes per bound morpheme. Fusional languages (like Latin) fuse multiple features into one affix, sometimes changing the stem as well. Isolating languages rely less on affixation. Phonology and orthography influence how affixes appear and are pronounced, with phenomena such as allomorphy producing variant forms of the same affix depending on context.

In linguistics and natural language processing, affix analysis helps with morphology, lemmatization, and stemming, enabling more accurate parsing and understanding of word forms across languages.