Suffiksilla

Suffiksilla is a term used in linguistics, drawn from the Finnish word suffiksi meaning "suffix," to describe the use of suffixes to form and modify words. It refers to a morphological mechanism in which morphemes are attached to a word stem at the end to express grammatical relations or derive new lexemes. Suffiksilla is especially central in suffixing and agglutinative languages, where long chains of suffixes encode multiple features.

The concept covers inflectional suffixes, which mark case, number, tense, mood, person, and definiteness, as well as derivational suffixes, which create new words or change word class. For example, in Finnish talo "house" can take -ssa to form talossa “in the house” (inessive), and in Turkish ev-ler forms evler “houses” by adding suffixes for number and plurality. Such suffix chains may convey several grammatical meanings at once.

In linguistic typology, suffiksilla helps distinguish suffix-dominant languages from those that rely more on prefixes or infixes. Phonology, such as vowel harmony, can shape which suffixes attach, and syntax receives information through case endings and agreement marks rather than independent words.

In computational linguistics, suffix-based morphology is essential for lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, and morphological parsing. The study of suffiksilla clarifies how words encode meaning and how morphological structure contributes to grammar and lexicon.