Suffixes can carry grammatical information (inflectional suffixes), or lexical information (derivational suffixes). An inflectional suffix is sometimes called a desinence.

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.

A large number of endings are found in many synthetic languages such as Czech, German, Finnish, Latin, Hungarian, Russian, etc.

Suffixes used in English frequently have Greek, French or Latin origins.

Inflectional suffixes

Inflection changes grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. In the example:

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

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

Derivational suffixes

In the example:

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

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

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
• Suffixes

External links

• online reference for prefixes and suffixes