Tiläggatillägga

Tiläggatillägga is a coined term used in linguistic discussion to describe a hypothetical process of nested affixation, where an additive morpheme attaches to a base word and that additive morpheme itself bears another additive morpheme. The expression is not part of standard dictionaries or widely attested in descriptive grammars, and it is generally treated as a theoretical construct rather than a widely documented phenomenon.

Etymology and sense are indicative rather than prescriptive. The term combines Swedish elements tilägg and lägga till, meaning “an addition” and “to add,” with a reduplication-like implication of adding another layer. In this sense, tiläggatillägga conveys the idea of “an addition of an addition” or a layered extension, used to discuss how some languages might form complex meanings by stacking affixes that themselves encode addition or augmentation.

Morphologically, tiläggatillägga is described as a two-stage affixation process. A base lexeme X takes an additive suffix A that signals augmentation (for example, a sense of addition, extension, or supplementation). Then, in a second step, A takes its own affix B, also expressing addition, yielding a form X-A-B. Semantically, the final word communicates not just an added property but an additional layer of addition on top of the first, resulting in a highly marked, multi-layered meaning.

In practice, tiläggatillägga is primarily a theoretical illustration rather than a mainstream category in typology. It is relevant to discussions of nested or iterative affixation and to cross-linguistic comparisons of how languages encode additive meaning in multiple morphological strata. Researchers may use the concept to frame questions about diachronic change, morphological transparency, and the limits of affix stacking.