Suffixal

Suffixal is an adjective used in linguistics to describe phenomena, forms, or systems that involve suffixes—the morphemes attached to the end of a word stem. The term covers both derivational suffixes, which create new words or shift word class (for example, -ness in happiness, -ment in arrangement), and inflectional suffixes, which encode grammatical information such as tense, number, or case (for example -s in cats, -ed in walked). Suffixal morphology operates at the right edge of a base form and can be productive or restricted depending on the language.

In morphological description, suffixal processes contrast with prefixal and infixal processes, which attach morphemes at the beginning or inside the stem, respectively. A language may be described as suffixal when a large portion of its affixal material attaches at the end of roots or stems. This characteristic is common in many languages with agglutinative or fusional systems, where long chains of suffixes convey grammatical relations and word meaning.

Suffixal languages or suffixing tendencies are frequently discussed in typology and historical linguistics. Examples often cited include Turkish and Finnish, where extensive suffix sequences build up complex words carrying multiple grammatical categories. However, linguistic descriptions acknowledge variation within and across language families, and terms like suffixal are part of a larger framework that includes prefixal, infixal, and circumfixal affixation.

Overall, suffixal describes anything pertaining to suffixes, their functions, and their role in word formation and grammar. It is most commonly encountered in academic discussions of morphology and language structure.