suffissi

Suffissi, or suffixes, are morphemes attached to the end of a word stem to modify its meaning or grammatical function. They are a major class of affixes used in many languages, including Italian, and they play a central role in word formation and in marking agreement and other grammatical features.

Suffissi are typically divided into derivational and inflectional types. Derivational suffixes create new words or change the word class, often shifting meaning or part of speech (for example, forming a noun from a verb or an adjective from a noun). Inflectional suffixes encode grammatical information such as number, gender, tense, mood, or aspect without changing the lexical category of the word. Some suffixes are highly productive and can be combined in series to form longer words; others are more limited to particular domains or historical layers of the language.

In Italian, suffixes illustrate these functions with notable variety. Derivational examples include -zione or -tura, which nominalize verbs or adjectives (creazione, realizzazione); -ista, which yields agent nouns (pianista, idealista); and diminutives such as -ino, -etto, -ello (casetta, bambino). Augmentatives and pejoratives such as -one and -accio are also common. Adjectival suffixes include -oso, -ivo, -ico, which expand or modify meaning. Inflectional endings mark number and gender on nouns and adjectives (for example, masculine singular -o changing to plural -i; feminine singular -a changing to plural -e) and participate in verb conjugations to indicate person, number, or tense. Suffixes thus provide a flexible toolkit for shaping words and their grammatical relationships.