desinenza

Desinenza, in linguistics, is the final part of a word that marks its grammatical function. In inflected languages, desinenze (plural) encode information such as tense, person, number, mood, gender, or case, and may coincide with what English calls an ending or suffix. A desinenza is typically bound to the stem and does not normally carry independent meaning outside of its grammatical role.

Examples illustrate its role. In Italian verbs, present indicative endings such as -o, -i, -a, -iamo, -ate, -ano are desinenze that indicate person and number. Nouns and adjectives also show desinenze to signal number and gender (for example casa vs case, bambino vs bambini; masculine -o / -i, feminine -a / -e). In Latin and many other languages, noun and adjective endings for case and number, or verb endings for person and tense, are desinenze. Some languages fuse multiple grammatical categories into a single ending, while others use separate endings for different features; some languages rely on vowel reduction or consonant alternations as part of the desinence system.

Design and analysis: The desinenza contrasts with derivational morphemes, which create new words or change lexical class rather than mark grammatical function. In description, desinenze belong to paradigms and inflection patterns; the study of them is part of morphology.

Etymology: The word desinenza comes from Latin terms used in grammar to denote the ending of a word. In Italian grammar, the term is widely used to distinguish endings from the root or stem and from independent affixes.