Saffixering

Saffixering is a linguistic term used to describe the process of forming new words by attaching affixes to a base form. It is closely related to affixation and is sometimes employed to emphasize the act of adding morphemes such as prefixes, suffixes, infixes, or circumfixes to a stem. The result is a derived or inflected word that may alter the word’s part of speech, meaning, or grammatical function.

In morphology, saffixering is a fundamental mechanism in many language families, particularly in agglutinative and fusional languages. Affixes can appear at different positions: prefixes at the beginning, suffixes at the end, infixes inside the base, or circumfixes that surround the base. The choice and order of affixes depend on the language’s phonology, morphology, and semantics. Affixation can be derivational, creating new words, or inflectional, marking grammatical categories such as tense, number, case, or mood.

Morphophonological interactions are common in saffixering. Phonological changes may accompany affix attachment, including vowel harmony, consonant assimilation, or stem modification. Orthographic conventions vary across languages, with some affixes triggering changes to the stem’s spelling or pronunciation while others are appended without alteration.

Historically and cross-linguistically, affixation is a central word-formation strategy and often plays a role in grammaticalization. In computational linguistics, saffixering is modeled through rules, finite-state morphologies, or subword units in morphological analyzers and generators.

Examples include English unions such as teach + -er = teacher or un- + happy = unhappy. The term saffixering is not universally used; many traditions simply refer to affixation.