As you know, most of the new words in the language appear with the help of morphemes. Of course, lexical units are formed both by the transition from one part of speech to another, and through borrowing. But the most productive way is to attach prefixes and suffixes to the original basis.
Let us dwell in more detail on one of the word-forming morphemes. So, let's answer the question of what is a suffix.
The Russian word can consist of four elements, and only the root is obligatory of them. Suffix, ending and prefix are not always there. The absence of inflection is an indicator of the unchanging part of speech;
this morpheme is not involved in word formation.
The presence of prefixes and suffixes in the lexical unit usually allows us to understand that this is not a source word, but a derivative. This means that it arose through the attachment of morphemes to the producing base.
So, a suffix is ​​one of two word-forming elements. This morpheme has a fixed position after the root, or after the suffix in front.
Each part of speech has its own group of such elements. In other words, the suffixes of nouns and the suffixes of verbs never coincide, they are rarely homonymous. Even having no idea what a particular word means, by suffix we can guess which morphological group it belongs to. By the way, consoles do not have such a feature.
To better understand what a suffix is, consider
examples of words from different parts of speech.
In the series of words: “burning”, “mixing”, “zeal”, “aspiration”, “weaving” - there is one and the same producing element. The suffix "eni" has the meaning of action, and with it only nouns are formed.
Adjectives “talkative”, “steady”, “reckless” unites the general meaning of ability or tendency to any action. Such a semantic attribute to words is given by the suffix “chiv”.
For a verb and its special forms - participles and gerunds - this morpheme usually has no semantic connotations like the nominal parts of speech. Their suffixes are just an indicator of the grammatical features of the word:
For example: “done”, “learned”, “escaped” - in all these verbs “l” indicates the form of the past tense.
In the words: “thinking”, “living”, “shining” - alternating suffixes “yush” / “razh” form real participles of the present.
The origin of the participles is also associated with this word-forming morpheme. Their appearance is due to the basis of the verb, to which the characteristic suffixes “a”, “I”, “learn”, “uchi”, “c”, “lice” join: play - effortlessly, learn - learn, watch - watch, etc. .
The answer to the question of what a suffix is ​​will be incomplete if we do not recall such a phenomenon as unique affixes. Most often, word-forming morphemes are used repeatedly, they give lexical units a general 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 “poppy” there is an unusual affix “hell”. Or in the word "bugles" after the root to the
zero end there is a suffix "tier", 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. Morphemic, 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 language laws.