afixes

Afixes, a term sometimes used as an alternative spelling to affixes in older or specialized linguistic literature, are bound morphemes that attach to a word stem to modify its meaning or grammatical function. They do not stand alone and combine with a base to form related words or to express grammatical information.

Afixes are traditionally categorized by position relative to the stem: prefixes attach to the left, suffixes to the right, infixes insert inside the stem, and circumfixes surround the stem with elements on both sides.

Functions of afixes include derivation and inflection. Derivational afixes create new words or change word class (for example, un- in unhappy or -ness turning an adjective into a noun). Inflectional afixes encode grammatical categories such as tense, number, case, mood, or aspect without changing the word’s lexical category.

Distribution and typology vary across languages. Some languages attach many afixes per word, a pattern typical of agglutinative or polysynthetic languages, while others use fewer affixes and fuse meanings more tightly, as in fusional languages. The order of afixes is often constrained by morphotactics and may interact with phonology, producing morphophonological changes.

Relation to other concepts: afixes are contrasted with free morphemes (standing alone) and with roots or stems in morphological analysis. In computational linguistics, affix stripping or stemming is a common preprocessing step. The term afix is largely historical or alternative; affix remains the standard term in modern usage.

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