Sufiksi

Sufiksi is a linguistic term used to describe suffixes, morphemes that attach to the end of a word stem to modify its meaning or grammatical function. As a class of affixes, sufiksi are bound morphemes that cannot stand alone, and they can serve inflectional purposes, such as marking tense or number, or derivational purposes, such as forming new words or changing the word’s part of speech. Sufiksi occur in many language families and interact with a language’s phonology and morphology.

Functions and types of sufiksi vary by language. Inflectional sufiksi encode grammatical categories like tense, number, person, case, or mood, without typically changing the core lexical meaning. Derivational sufiksi are used to create new words or alter a word’s class, for example turning a verb into a noun or an adjective into a related form. Some languages employ multiple sufiksi in sequence, stacking them to convey complex information in a single word.

Examples illustrate their use. In English, suffixes such as -ed (past tense), -ing (present participle), -s (plural), and -ness (noun-formation) attach to bases. In Turkish, suffixes like -lar/-ler indicate plural and -de/-te express location; Finnish employs a rich set of case and circumstantial suffixes such as -ssa and -ssä. In agglutinative languages, sufiksi tend to form long chains, each adding a discrete meaning; in fusional languages, a single suffix may encode several grammatical categories at once.

Sufiksi are central to the study of morphology, illustrating how languages extend and modify word meaning through endwise affixation. See also: affix, prefix, infix, circumfix, morphology.