sufiksie

Sufiksie are affixes that attach to the end of a word (the stem) to modify its meaning or grammatical function. They are bound morphemes, meaning they cannot stand alone, and they occur in many languages as a primary mechanism for word formation and grammar.

Sufiksie can be divided into inflectional and derivational types. Inflectional suffixes express grammatical categories such as number, tense, case, mood, or person, without changing the core word class (for example, turning a noun into a plural form or a verb into a past tense). Derivational suffixes create new words or alter word class, such as forming adjectives from nouns or nouns from verbs, and they often carry semantic weight beyond mere grammatical agreement.

Placement and chaining: A stem may take multiple sufiksie in sequence, and the order of attachment can be important for interpretation. Some languages are highly suffixal, with long chains of suffixes conveying complex information. Others use a mix of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes, or rely more on word order. Vowel harmony and consonant assimilation can affect the phonological shape of adjoining suffixes.

Typology and examples: Sufiksie are especially prominent in suffixing and agglutinative languages. English uses suffixes for plural (-s), past tense (-ed), and derivation (-ness, -able). Turkish and Hungarian rely heavily on suffixes for grammatical relations and word formation (for example, Turkish -lar/-ler for plurals, -de/-da for location). Finnish marks case and movement with suffixes like -ssa/-sta and -iin. Some languages also employ suffixes for politeness or honorifics, as in certain East Asian and Pacific languages.

Computational relevance: In natural language processing, recognizing sufiksie enables stemming, lemmatization, morphological parsing, and generation, improving search, translation, and language understanding.