desinenze

Desinenze are linguistic elements that appear at the end of a word to indicate grammatical information such as gender, number, person, tense, mood or case. In Italian they function as inflectional morphemes, modifying the stem of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs so that the lexical item can agree with other constituents in a clause. The term is also used in broader Romance linguistics to refer to the set of endings that distinguish conjugation classes or declension patterns inherited from Latin.

In nominal morphology the most frequent desinenze are –o, –a, –i, –e, which mark masculine singular, feminine singular, masculine plural and feminine plural respectively (e.g., libro, libra, libri, libri). For adjectives the same endings are applied, allowing agreement with the noun they modify. Pronouns show a richer set, for instance the personal pronoun “lui” (him) versus “loro” (them), where the final –i signals the plural form.

Verb desinenze are more varied. Regular verbs of the first conjugation end in –are, and their present indicative forms add –o, –i, –a, –iamo, –ate, –ano (parlo, parli, parla, parliamo, parlate, parlano). The second and third conjugations use –ere and –ire with analogous paradigms. Tense, mood and aspect are encoded by combinations of auxiliary verbs and specific endings, as in the passato remoto (parlai, parlasti, parlò, parlammo, parlaste, parlarono).

Derivational suffixes, sometimes also called desinenze, can create new lexical items (‑zione, ‑mente, ‑ità). Although they alter meaning rather than grammatical agreement, they share the same suffixal position in the word.

The study of desinenze is central to morphological analysis, historical linguistics and language teaching, because the predictable patterns they form provide clues to word class, syntactic function and etymology across the Romance language family.