Suffixes – Different types and examples

Suffixes

• A suffix is a letter or a group of letters that we add at the end of a word in order to form a new word.
• Suffixes come under the group called affixes, which themselves come under a group called morphemes.

Examples of Morphemes:

• Consider the word ‘kindness’. It consists of two units, ‘kind’ and ‘ness’.
• Such units are called morphemes.
• Thus, we can say that the word kindness is made up of two morphemes: ‘kind’ and ‘ness’.

Example:

• The word unkindly is made up of three morphemes: ‘un’, ‘kind’, and ‘ly’.
• Therefore, a morpheme may be defined as the smallest meaningful unit in the structure of a language.

• A morpheme that can occur freely or in combination with other morphemes is called a free morpheme.
• Some morpheme that cannot exist independently. It takes the help of some morphemes like -ed, -ing, -ment, -un, etc. These are known as bound morpheme.
• When the suffixes are removed from words, we are left with is the root or base.
• This goes on to prove that affixes are always subservient to the roots because, it is the roots that get modified to form new words.
• Suffixes are the affixes that occur at the end of word.

Examples:

Madness – mad + -ness

Rightly – right + -ly

• Suffixes can be classified as inflectional suffixes and derivational suffixes.

Inflectional Suffixes:

• Suffixes that change the form of a word alone, and not its class, are called inflectional suffixes.
• They do not change the meaning of the word altogether, and therefore do not create new words.

• Example: In ‘smile, smiles, smiling, and smiled’, -s, -ing, and -ed are the inflectional suffixes.
• The function of inflectional suffixes is to indicate grammatical relations such as number, gender, tenses, and so on.
• Inflectional suffixes are not followed by any other suffixes as they occur at the end of the words.
• Therefore, they are called the closing morphemes.

Derivational Suffixes:

• Suffixes that create new words from the root word are called derivational suffixes.
• Let’s take the word child. Adding the suffix -hood to it results in a total change of meaning and the resultant word would be childhood.

• Derivational suffixes also have the ability to change the class of a word.

Example: Take the word kind. Kind is an adjective. Now consider adding either of the suffixes -ness or -ly.

• Adding -ness results in the formation of kindness, which is a noun, and adding -ly results in the formation of kindly, which is an adverb.
• Derivational suffixes are therefore class changing affixes.

Examples:

Judge – Judgement

Happy (adjective) – Happiness (noun)

Organize (verb) – Organization (noun)

Write (verb) – Writer (noun)

• Derivational suffixes can be succeeded by other derivational or inflectional suffixes.

Examples:

Organ /iz / ation/ al

Human / iz/ ation

• Let’s see some more examples.

-ee:

• Address – Addressee
• Interview – Interviewee
• Refer – Referee

-er/ -or:

• Work – Worker
• Teach – Teacher
• Act – Actor
• Edit – Editor

-ism:

• Critic – Criticism
• Human – Humanism
• Journal – Journalism

-ment:

• Govern – Government
• Enjoy – Enjoyment
• Develop – Development