As you know, most new words in the language appear with the help of morphemes. Of course, lexical units are formed both by transition from one part of speech to another, and with the help of borrowings. But the most productive way is to add prefixes and suffixes to the original stem.
Let's take a closer look at one of the word-forming morphemes. So, let's answer the question of what a suffix is.
A Russian word can consist of four elements, and only the root is obligatory. Suffix, ending and prefix are not always present. The absence of inflection is an indicator of the invariable part of speech, this morpheme is not involved in word formation.
The presence of prefixes and suffixes in a lexical unit usually makes us understand that we have not the original word, but a derivative. This means that it arose by attaching morphemes to a generating stem.
So, one of the two word-forming elements is called a suffix. This morpheme has a fixed positionafter the root, or after the leading suffix.
Each part of speech has its own group of such elements. In other words, the suffixes of nouns and suffixes of verbs never coincide, they are extremely rarely homonymous. Even without having an idea what this or that word means, by the suffix we can guess which morphological group it belongs to. By the way, set-top boxes don't have this feature.
To better understand what a suffix is, let's look at examples of words from different parts of speech.
In the series of words: "burning", "mixing", "zeal", "aspiration", "weaving" - there is one and the same generating element. The suffix "yeni" has the meaning of action, and with its help only nouns are formed.
The adjectives "talkative", "steady", "reckless" combine the general meaning of the ability or inclination to do something. The suffix “chiv” gives such a semantic feature to words.
In the verb and its special forms - participles and gerunds - this morpheme usually does not have semantic shades like nominal parts of speech. Their suffixes are only an indicator of the grammatical features of the word:
For example: "did", "learned", "ran away" - in all these verbs "l" indicates the past tense form.
In the words: “thinking”, “living”, “shining” - alternating suffixes “yush” / “ush” form real participles of the present tense.
The origin of gerunds is also connected with this word-forming morpheme. Their appearance is due to the stem of the verb, to whichthe characteristic suffixes “a”, “ya”, “learn”, “yuchi”, “v”, “lice” are added: play - effortlessly, learn - having learned, look - looking, etc.
The answer to the question of what a suffix is will be incomplete if we do not remember such a phenomenon as unique affixes. Most often, word-forming morphemes are used repeatedly, they give lexical units a common semantic connotation. But in the language there are suffixes that can be seen in only one word. There are relatively few of them. For example, in the noun "popadya" there is an unusual affix "ad". Or in the word "bugle" after the root to the zero ending there is a suffix "tier", which is not found in other units.
The role of word-forming morphemes is very great, with their help the lexical composition of the language is enriched. Morphemics, as one of the sections of linguistics, includes knowledge of what a suffix is. The study of the constituent elements of words is extremely important for understanding the laws of language.
