afixos

Afixos, or affixes, are bound morphemes that attach to a word stem to modify its meaning or grammatical function. They do not occur as independent words but are joined to bases to form new words or to express grammatical relations.

Common types include prefixes, which attach before the base; suffixes, which attach after the base; infixes, which insert inside the base; and circumfixes, which attach both before and after the base as a single unit.

Affixes can be derivational or inflectional. Derivational affixes create new words or change part of speech, such as un- in unhappy (negation) or -ness in happiness (noun from adjective). Inflectional affixes mark grammatical features like tense, number, case, or agreement, as in English -s for plurals or -ed for past tense, or in Turkish suffixes for person and tense.

Affixes vary in productivity and regularity. They may undergo phonological or orthographic changes (allomorphy) and can attach to roots with different phonological shapes. In many languages, affixation is a primary mechanism for word formation and grammatical concord, while other languages rely more on isolation or analytic strategies.