affixit

Affixit is a term used in linguistics to refer to the process and study of affixation—attaching prefixes, suffixes, infixes, or circumfixes to a word stem to derive new forms. It is also used as a proper name for several software libraries and research projects that implement affixation rules in natural language processing.

The word stems from Latin affixit, meaning "he attached," from affixus "fixed to" and figere "to fix." In morphology, affixit studies how affixes modify meaning, part of speech, or tense, number, and mood. It distinguishes productive affixes from irregular or borrowed forms; allomorphy and morphophonemic changes may be handled as part of the affixit model.

In computational linguistics, affixit-inspired systems use dictionaries of affixes and phonological rules to generate inflected forms or perform lemmatization. Implementation approaches include rule-based morphology and finite-state methods, often integrated with part-of-speech tagging and syntactic parsing. The framework supports agglutinative and fusional languages, enabling scalable morphological processing in NLP pipelines.

Common examples of affixation include prefixes such as re- in reappear, suffixes such as -ed in walked, and infixes found in Tagalog forms. Affixit research emphasizes the systematic nature of affixation across languages and its role in language learning, information retrieval, and data compression.

See also: morphology, lemmatization, finite-state transducers.