Suffiksformer

Suffiksformer (suffix forms) are the word forms created by attaching suffixes to a base or stem. They express grammatical information and are a central feature of many languages' morphology. These forms are bound morphemes: they cannot stand alone and must attach to a stem. Through suffixation, a single stem can yield a range of forms that encode tense, aspect, mood, voice, number, case, gender, person, and comparison, among other features.

Suffix forms can be regular, following predictable patterns, or irregular, with irregular spellings or pronunciations. They may appear as a single suffix or as a sequence of suffixes stacked on the stem. Some languages use suffixes to mark multiple grammatical features simultaneously, a pattern common in fusional and agglutinative languages. Allomorphy may occur when the same grammatical category has different suffix realizations depending on phonological or lexical context.

There are different functional kinds of suffixes. Inflectional suffixes modify a word's grammatical category without changing its core meaning or word class, while derivational suffixes can create new words or change word class (for example, turning a verb into a noun). The study of suffiksformer sits within morphology, the branch of linguistics concerned with word structure.

Examples in English include the plural suffix -s (cat → cats), the past tense suffix -ed (walk → walked), and the present participle suffix -ing (walk → walking). In other languages, suffix forms can be more extensive, as in Finnish or Turkish, where many grammatical features are carried by suffix sequences.