ragosztása

Ragosztása is a term used in Hungarian linguistics to denote the distribution or assignment of inflectional suffixes (ragok) to a word’s stem in order to express grammatical categories. It is closely related to ragozás (inflection) and describes the patterns by which suffixes are chosen and combined across the language’s word classes.

In nouns and pronouns, ragosztása governs the suffixes that mark case, number, and possession; in verbs, it governs person, number, tense, mood, aspect, and voice. The same stem can take different suffix sequences depending on the syntactic and semantic context. Hungarian’s status as an agglutinative language means many grammatical relations are expressed by attaching suffixes, and ragosztása must account for phonological processes such as vowel harmony and other adjustments that accompany attachment.

The concept is often described in terms of inflectional paradigms (ragozási paradigmák) that group related forms and a suffix inventory (ragok) that lists possible endings. Describing ragosztása involves mapping each form to a base stem and grammatical meaning, and noting any alternations caused by phonology or assimilation.

Applications of ragosztása appear in linguistic description, language teaching, and natural language processing. It provides a framework for analyzing how Hungarian expresses grammatical relations through suffixation, helps explain form changes in context, and supports systematic learning and computational modeling of affix patterns.