Which type of suffix indicates possession, gender, number, tense, voice, person, and mood without changing the part of speech?

The correct answer is inflectional suffixes, which serve a specific function in grammar. Inflectional suffixes modify a word to express grammatical relationships without altering its part of speech. For example, adding "-s" to a noun indicates plurality (e.g., "cat" becomes "cats"). Similarly, adding "-ed" or "-ing" to a verb changes its tense (e.g., "walk" becomes "walked" or "walking") and adding such suffixes does not change "walk" from a verb to another part of speech.

These suffixes provide critical information about the word's grammatical role, such as whether it is singular or plural, what tense it is in, and who is performing the action. This contrasts with derivational suffixes, which can change the meaning or the part of speech of a base word (e.g., adding "-ment" to "achieve" forms "achievement"). Additionally, compound suffixes, while related to the construction of new words, do not focus solely on grammatical adjustment, and negative suffixes specifically indicate negation rather than handling various grammatical features. Thus, inflectional suffixes uniquely fulfill the requirement of indicating possession, gender, number, tense, voice, person, and