suffixer

Suffixer is a term used in linguistics and computational linguistics to describe the mechanism by which suffixes attach to base forms of words. A suffixer refers to a morpheme that occurs at the end of a word stem to derive a new word or to express grammatical information, such as tense, number, case, or part of speech. Suffixers are central to suffixing or derivational morphology and contrast with prefixes, which attach at the beginning of a word, and infixes, which insert inside the word.

Etymology and scope: The word combines suffix with the agentive suffix -er, a productive English suffix used to form nouns or instruments, extended here to denote the process or the affixes involved in attaching endings.

Types and behavior: Productive suffixers have broad applicability across many stems (for example, -ness, -ment, -ing in English). Non-productive suffixers appear in limited contexts or specific lexical items. Allomorphy is common among suffixers, with forms varying by phonology or morphophonology. In agglutinative languages such as Turkish or Finnish, long chains of suffixers create highly inflected word forms.

Examples: English derives happiness from happy + -ness, careful from care + -ful, walked from walk + -ed, and running from run + -ing. Other languages illustrate suffixers like Spanish -ción, German -lich, and Turkish suffixes that attach in sequence to express multiple grammatical categories.

In computing: A suffixer may refer to a software component or algorithm that generates or strips suffixes for tasks such as stemming, morphological analysis, or lemmatization, or to a rule-based suffix generator in text generation.

See also: affix, suffix, prefix, infix, morphology, derivation, inflection, stemmer.