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I asked this question on Italian exchange, but I was told that this is more of a question about English terminology.

So here it is.

I am currently writing a short summary of certain morphological characteristics of Italian for my Thesis.

Now, Italian has certain morphemes that are put between root and other markers.

For instance, the future is made by root+fut+person.number:

am-er-emo “love-fut-2.PL” = we will love.

Now, is “-er-“ an infix, an interfix or just a suffix?

That is, how do I “parse” the word am-er-emo “love-fut-2.PL”?

“root-suffix-suffix”, “root-infix-suffix” or “root-interfix-suffix”?

Thanks

P.

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    Don't forget: 1.PL for "we".
    – Luke Sawczak
    Commented Apr 27, 2018 at 12:06

2 Answers 2

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The general rule that I learned is: if it comes before the root, it's a prefix; if it comes after the root, it's a suffix; if it comes inside the root itself, it's an infix; if it comes both before and after, it's a circumfix.

Thus, your am-er-emo would be root-suffix-suffix, even though one comes closer to the verb than the other.

On the other hand, this isn't universally consistent. In Swahili, for example, tenses are indicated by a verb prefix, and any prefixes that come between the tense and the root are instead called "infixes". (A-na-ye-penda 3SG-PRES-REL-love "the one who loves" is analyzed as prefix-prefix-INFIX-root.)

In general, more and more linguists seem to be turning to the generic "affix" for all four cases.

EDIT: As requested, a bit of explanation for infixes. The best example I know of is from Proto-Indo-European and several of its descendants. In PIE, an -n- could be infixed before the last consonant of a verb stem to indicate the present tense. Latin, for example, has the verb root vic- "to conquer", as in veni vidi vici. In the present tense, however, it appears as vinc-, as in invincible. Similarly, the root scid- "cut" appears as scind- in the present. (There's actually one and only one instance of this nasal infix remaining in native English verbs: present-tense stand versus past-tense stood.)

EDIT: I forgot interfixes! Interfixes are entirely separate, they're not morphemes at all (in the sense of "meaning-bearing units"). Interfixes are sequences of phonemes that are inserted between two morphemes without having any meaning themselves. English doesn't really have these at all, but in German you see this with the /s/ added between elements of compound words.

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    In Latin and its daughter languages, there can be and often are several inflectional suffixes in a row. This certainly includes the future tense marker, which precedes the person/number markers.
    – jlawler
    Commented Apr 27, 2018 at 18:58
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    Agree with everything except "In general, more and more linguists seem to be turning to the generic "affix" for all four cases"
    – Alex B.
    Commented Apr 27, 2018 at 20:58
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    That Swahili example seems like just a misuse of the terminology, unless with longer roots it actually is inserted inside. As Wikipedia says, "In learner materials, all types of prefixes other than the subject prefixes are frequently, erroneously referred to as infixes."
    – curiousdannii ♦
    Commented Apr 27, 2018 at 22:13
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    Maybe also mention that suffixes can (and, I believe, in this example, do) have a fixed order. So you have a series of slots where some are optional (or can be thought of as being filled with zero in the present tense, for example, or imperative) but whose order cannot be shuffled around.
    – tripleee
    Commented Apr 30, 2018 at 12:17
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    It’s less common, but the exact same -s- interfix for compounds found in other Germanic languages (derived from old genitival forms) does exist in English as well. It’s most common in compounds with words denoting people as the second element (bondsman, marksman, craftsman, tradespeople), but there are few other cases too, like cockscomb. And of course there’s -o-, which is Graeco-Latin in origin but fully productive in English.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Jun 16 at 15:17
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I would make an important differentiation here between affixes and verb endings. Italian verbs are formed, as you well said, by adding morphemes to the verb root. These morphemes though do not fall into the infixes class, since the infixes generally describe a quality and are not strictly binary, whereas grammatical morphemes are binary (think about gender and number). also, I don't think the analysis of the verb you did it's correct: am-er-emo. I wouldn't separate "er" from "emo", since the first does not reflect future tense. consider the "am-er-ei", 1PS conditional: here "er" does not refer to future tense. thus, I would rather break them up as "am-eremo" and "am-erei": here you can clearly recognise the root and the ending. prefix example: preordinare "to pre-order"; infixes do not really exist in Italian, suffix example: mangialo "eat that", where the suffix "lo" is a 3PS pronoun and corresponds to "that/it". though this is still a hot topic amongst linguists :)

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