suffixmarking

Suffix marking is a morphological process in which grammatical information is expressed by attaching suffixes to a word stem. The suffixes can indicate a wide range of features, including case and number on nouns, gender agreement, tense, aspect, mood, person, and evidentiality on verbs, as well as derivational meaning that changes word class. Suffix marking is a primary mode of affixal marking and is contrasted with prefixes and infixes. It is particularly productive in fusional and agglutinative language types.

In fusional languages, a single suffix may encode several features at once, often with irregular allomorphy. In agglutinative languages, each suffix typically marks a single grammatical category and can be stacked in long chains, as in Turkish or Finnish. Common examples include English plural -s and past tense -ed; Turkish suffixes for possession, number, and case (for example -lar/-ler for plurals, -de/-da for location). Other languages display extensive suffixation for honorifics or politeness, such as Japanese with its honorific suffixes like -san, or derivational suffixes that create new nouns or adjectives from verbs.

Suffix marking interacts with phonology, yielding phenomena such as vowel harmony and allomorphy, which can alter suffix forms depending on the surrounding environment. It also shapes syntax by signaling the grammatical role of a word, which can influence word order and agreement strategies across a language.

In computational linguistics, suffix marking affects tokenization, stemming, and morphological parsing, and is a key consideration in developing natural language processing tools for suffix-rich languages.