ROOTS, STEMS AND BASES

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 415.

The stem is that part of a word that is in existence before any inflectional affixes (those affixes whose presence is required by the syntax such as markers of singular and plural number in nouns, tense in verbs, etc.) have been added. Inflection is discussed in section. For the moment a few examples should suffice.

Noun stem Plural

Cat -s

Worker -s

In the word-form cats, the plural inflectional suffix –s is attached to the simple stem cat, which is a bare root, the irreducible core of the word.

In workers the same inflectional -s suffix comes after a slightly more complex stem consisting of the root work plus the suffix -er which is used to the form nouns from verbs (with the meaning “someone who does the action designated by the verb (worker). Here work is the root, but worker is the stem to which -s is attached.

Finally a baseis any unit whatsoever to which affixes of any kind can be added. The affixes attached to a base may be inflectional affixesselected for syntactic reasons or derivational affixes which alter the meaning or grammatical category of the base. An unadorned root like boy can be a base since it can have attached to it inflectional affixes like -s to form the plural boys or derivational affixes like -ish to turn the noun boy into the adjective boyish. In other words, all roots are bases.Bases are called stems only in the context of inflectional morphology.