Suffix question

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Spring

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Hi writers,

My 3rd grade daughter received practice worksheets for her state mandated testing which she is undergoing this week. This was one of the problems she practiced on at home to familiarize herself with the testing format:


Find the word in which only the suffix is underlined:
1. landed
2. closet
3. storms
4. television

Can someone help me out with the answer here? The following is my thinking regarding the options:

?

1. landed: The -ed shows a tense ending and isn't considered a suffix (verbal/tense endings don't count as suffixes, I believe.)
2. closet: the -et is part of the base word
3. storms: the -ms is part of the base word
4. television: -vision IS the base word and tele is a greek prefix meaning distance. (telephone, telecommunications, etc.)

So what's the answer?

I think the state's answer must be either 1 or 4. If a verbal ending can be a suffix, then multiple other answer options within my daughter's practice packet are done incorrectly.

So I'm thinking the state is wrong, but I'm not confident/hubristic enough to force the issue with the school yet. Educate me, please, on suffixes! Thanks you! :)
 

Kitty Pryde

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Wikipedia says it's 1:
In grammar, a suffix (also postfix, ending) is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs.

Suffixes can carry grammatical information (inflectional suffixes), or lexical information (derivational suffixes). An inflectional suffix is sometimes called a desinence.[1]

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 -ed marks the past tense.

And I agree that 4 is not right. But um, that's really confusing for a 3rd grader. Sheesh.
 

Mr. Chuckletrousers

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1.

Added to the base form of certain verbs this suffix creates the past participle/past tense:
e.g.
"kill" --> "killed"
"end" --> "ended"
"dread" --> "dreaded"
"strangle" --> "strangled"
"fire" --> "fired"
 

Juliette Wade

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I agree that it's #1.

The past tense endings are just that - endings, or suffixes in their own right. Television is either a compound word or a word with a prefix, so that's definitely not it.
 

Prawn

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why isn't the s on storms a suffix? both 1 and 3 have suffixes.
 
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