In grammar, a suffix or ending is an affix which is placed at the end of a word. Grammar is the field of Linguistics that covers the Rules governing the use of any given natural language. An affix is a Morpheme that is attached to a stem to form a word Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. In Grammar, the case of a Noun or Pronoun indicates its Grammatical function in a greater Phrase or Clause; such as the In Linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a Verb, Noun or Adjective from its Principal parts by Inflection

Suffixes can carry grammatical information (inflectional suffixes), or lexical information (derivational suffixes). In Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice In Linguistics, derivation is "Used to form new words as with happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from An inflectional suffix is sometimes called a desinence. ^[1]

Some examples from English:

Girls, where the suffix -s marks the plural;

He makes, where suffix -s marks the third person singular present tense;

He closed, where the suffix -d marks the past tense. Plural is a Grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the Referent in the real world In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" Present Tense is the first Sagittarius album released in 1968 by Columbia Records. The past tense is a Verb tense expressing action activity state or being in the past of the current moment (in an Absolute tense system or prior

A large number of endings are found in many synthetic languages such as Czech, German, Finnish, Latin, Hungarian, Russian, etc. A synthetic language, in Linguistic typology, is a Language with a high Morpheme -per- word ratio Czech (ˈʧɛk čeština ˈʧɛʃcɪna in Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers it is the majority language in the The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. Finnish ( or suomen kieli) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (92% As of 2006) and by ethnic Finns outside Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Hungarian ( magyar nyelv) is a Uralic language (more specifically a Ugric language) unrelated to most other languages in Europe. Russian ( transliteration:,) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages

Suffixes used in English frequently have Greek, French or Latin origins. Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome.

Inflectional suffixes

Inflection changes grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. A syntactic category is either a phrasal category, such as Noun phrase or Verb phrase, which can be decomposed into smaller syntactic In the example:

The weather forecaster said it would clear today, but it hasn't cleared at all.

the suffix -ed inflects the root-word clear to indicate past tense. The root is the primary lexical unit of a Word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents

Some inflectional suffixes in present day English:

• -s third person singular present
• -ed past tense
• -ing progressive/continuous
• -en past participle
• -s plural
• -en plural (irregular)
• -er comparative
• -est superlative
• -n't negative^[2]

Derivational suffixes

In the example:

"The weather forecaster said it would be clear today, but I can't see clearly at all"

the suffix -ly modifies the root-word clear from an adjective into an adverb. In Linguistics, a participle (from Latin participium, a Calque of Greek μετοχη "partaking" is a derivative of a non-finite In Grammar, the comparative is the form of an Adjective or Adverb which denotes the degree or grade by which a person thing or other entity has a property In Grammar the superlative of an Adjective or Adverb is the greatest form of adjective or adverb which indicates that something has some feature Grammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive Verb forms that are used to signal modality. In Grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a Noun or Pronoun, giving more information about the Derivation can also form a semantically distinct word within the same syntactic category. In this example:

"The weather forecaster said it would be a clear day today, but I think it's more like clearish!"

the suffix -ish modifies the root-word clear, changing its meaning to "clear, but not very clear".

Some derivational suffixes in present day English:

• -ize/-ise
• -fy
• -ly
• -able
• -ful
• -ness
• -ism
• -ment
• -ist
• -al

References

See also

• Affix
• Inflection
• Derivation (linguistics)
• Lexeme
• Marker (linguistics)
• Morpheme
• Prefix morpheme
• Category:Suffixes

External links

• online reference for prefixes and suffixes