tilføying

Tilføying, in linguistics, is the process of attaching morphemes to a word stem to form new words or to mark grammatical categories such as tense, number, or mood. The term comes from Danish tilføje, meaning “to add,” with the noun-forming suffix -ing. In broader usage, tilføying is commonly referred to as affixation and encompasses prefixation, suffixation and infixation, as well as related morphophonological adjustments that occur during word formation.

There are several primary types of tilføying. Prefixation involves adding a morpheme to the beginning of a word, for example the English prefix un- in unhappy. Suffixation attaches a morpheme to the end, such as -ness in happiness or -hed in venlighed in Danish. Infixation inserts a morpheme inside a word, a pattern found in a smaller set of languages (for example, certain infixes in Tagalog alter meaning or part of speech). Some languages combine multiple types in a single word to express complex meanings or grammatical relations.

Function and typology. Tilføying plays a central role in word formation, enabling derivation (creating new words) and inflection (marking grammatical categories). It interacts with phonology, sometimes triggering adjustments in pronunciation or spelling. While more productive in agglutinative and fusional languages, affixation is a widespread mechanism across language families, contributing to lexical expansion and the expression of syntax without changing word order.

See also: affixation, derivation, inflection, compounding.