All Answers (15)

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 785.

Fatemeh Hasani jalilian ·

Hi Singdha
Root is the smallest meaningful part of a word.
Stem is any morpheme which a syntactical affix can be added to
Base is any morpheme which an affix can be added to.
here agree is a root and base at the same time..it is a root because it is bare and an base because dis- and -ment can be added to it.
disagree is a stem because its is a verb and by adding ment it changes to an adjective
dis/ment are affixes.
affixes can't stand alone in languages. they are added to bases to change their meaning both semantically and syntactically.

Sep 7, 2012

Snigdha Paul · Banasthali University

I got your point Fateme but if we take the two words independently that is
Disagreement then we get dis--- agree---ment in which as you told dis/ment are affixes and the root word is agree........ but now if we take the word Disagree separately then dis---- agree in which dis is an affix but what about agree?? is this root or stem.... or we will consider the whole word disagree as verb...

Sep 7, 2012

Fatemeh Hasani jalilian ·

Agree is root and is capable of being stem! If ment is going to be added to it then agree plays the role of stem here. They are tied together. I mean we cant say since a morpheme is root it can't be stem or base.
I hope i was clear :)

Sep 7, 2012

Snigdha Paul · Banasthali University

yes i get the thing clear ........thanks a lot Fateme......

Sep 8, 2012

Fatemeh Hasani jalilian ·

U're WC:)

Sep 9, 2012

Sasikumar Mukundan · Centre for Development of Advanced Computing

I think the distinction is in the derivation. Stem-word is essentially chopping of the affix/suffix and what remains. Root needs to be a proper and valid word. That is, it must be morphologically the base. Root of went is go, but not the stem. When addition of suffix/affix transforms the root word, then root and stem may not be same.

Sep 9, 2012

Tahir Awan · Punjab University College of Information Technology

You may check Wikipedia for this. it contain many articles related to this . :)

Sep 9, 2012

Tahir Awan · Punjab University College of Information Technology

WIKIPEDIA is full of this thing . You may search for it and it contain a lot of pages about this ..

Sep 11, 2012

Nisheeth Joshi · Banasthali University

In Morphological Analysis we extract the root word and add additional information like tense aspects and modality. But, in most of the applications we do not require so much information. So, we resolve to some lighter applications a lemmatizer or a stemmer. A lemmatizer would remove the infections (in your case affixes) and would give you a proper word while a stemmer may remove the affixes and would not provide you with a proper word. For example, lets take a word 'features'. A lemmatizer would give you 'feature' (a complete word making some sense, this called a lemma) while a stemmer may give you 'featur '. it might seem that lemmatizers are more useful then stemmers, but it is not true. It depends what you wish to achieve, what are you developing.
So, in morphological analysis you get root + affixes, a lemmatizer gives you a complete word making sense (lemma) which removes affixes and add some info to make it a proper dictionary word. A stemmer gives you a stem (after removing affixes) which may or may not resort to a dictionary word. Hope this clears your doubt.

Oct 16, 2012

Snigdha Paul · Banasthali University

Yes sir my doubt is clear now.....:)

Oct 16, 2012

Bachir Bouhania · University of Adrar

great; thnx a lot guys coz i also was lost in between stems and roots, lemmas and so on. This discussion has really enlightened me.

Jan 22, 2013

Dieter Wunderlich · Centre for General Linguistics

dis-agree-ment is a noun, which is formed by means of the suffix -ment from the verb dis-agree, which itself is formed by means of the prefix dis- from the verb /agree/. Note that morphological derivations (nearly) always combine morphemes, which have a meaning and belong to some category. In this case, /agree/ is the only element that can freely occur - thus, /agree/ must be the core element or root. However, roots can be projected on stems, and stems can be projected on words without any specific marking. It is more important to analyze the steps of derivation according to the category and meaning of the parts than to classify the parts into arbitrary classes like roots or stems.

Jan 25, 2013

Snigdha Paul · Banasthali University

Thanks a lot sir for your suggestion

Feb 11, 2013

Nebi Caka · University of Prishtina

Root, stem, base
Taken from: Bauer, Laurie (1983:20-21): English word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

‘Root', ‘stem' and ‘base' are all terms used in the literature to designate that part of a word that remains when all affixes have been removed.

A root is a form which is not further analysable, either in terms of derivational or inflectional morphology. It is that part of word-form that remains when all inflectional and derivational affixes have been removed. A root is the basic part always present in a lexeme. In the form ‘untouchables' the root is ‘touch', to which first the suffix ‘-able', then the prefix ‘un-‘ and finally the suffix ‘-s' have been added. In a compound word like ‘wheelchair' there are two roots, ‘wheel' and ‘chair'.

A stem is of concern only when dealing with inflectional morphology.
In the form ‘untouchables' the stem is ‘untouchable', although in the form ‘touched' the stem is ‘touch'; in the form ‘wheelchairs' the stem is ‘wheelchair', even though the stem contains two roots.

A base is any form to which affixes of any kind can be added. This means that any root or any stem can be termed a base, but the set of bases is not exhausted by the union of the set of roots and the set of stems: a derivationally analysable form to which derivational affixes are added can only be referred to as a base. That is, ‘touchable' can act as a base for prefixation to give ‘untouchable', but in this process ‘touchable' could not be referred to as a root because it is analysable in terms of derivational morphology, nor as a stem since it is not the adding of inflectional affixes which is in question.

Feb 13, 2014

Karoline Fischer · The Dwight School

Thank you, Mr. Caka,

That was the only answer that made sense on all levels and explained it very well.

Examples and Observations:

• "A stem may consist of a single root, of two roots forming a compound stem, or of a root (or stem) and one or more derivational affixes forming a derived stem."
  (R. M. W. Dixon, The Languages of Australia. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010)

• "The three main morphological processes are compounding, affixation, and conversion. Compounding involves adding two stems together, as in . . . window-sill--or blackbird, daydream, and so on. . . . For the most part, affixes attach to free stems, i.e., stems that can stand alone as a word. Examples are to be found, however, where an affix is added to a bound stem--compare perishable, where perish is free, with durable, where dur is bound, or unkind, where kind is free, with unbeknown, where beknown is bound. . . .
  
  "Conversion is where a stem is derived without any change in form from one belonging to a different class. For example, the verb bottle (I must bottle some plums) is derived by conversion from the noun bottle, while the noun catch (That was a fine catch) is converted from the verb."
  (Rodney D. Huddleston, English Grammar: An Outline. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988)

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• Correct English Grammar
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• The Difference Between a Base and a Stem
  "Base is the core of a word, that part of the word which is essential for looking up its meaning in the dictionary; stem is either the base by itself or the base plus another morpheme to which other morphemes can be added. [For example,] vary is both a base and a stem; when an affix is attached the base/stem is called a stem only. Other affixes can now be attached."
  (Bernard O'Dwyer, Modern English Structures: Form, Function, and Position. Broadview, 2000)

• The Difference Between a Root and a Stem
  "The terms root and stem are sometimes used interchangeably. However, there is a subtle difference between them: a root is a morpheme that expresses the basic meaning of a word and cannot be further divided into smaller morphemes. Yet a root does not necessarily constitute a fully understandable word in and of itself. Another morpheme may be required. For example, the form struct in English is a root because it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts, yet neither can it be used in discourse without a prefix or a suffix being added to it (construct, structural, destruction, etc.)
  
  "A stem may consist of just a root. However, it may also be analyzed into a root plus derivational morphemes . . .. Like a root, a stem may or may not be a fully understandable word. For example, in English, the forms reduce and deduce are stems because they act like any other regular verb--they can take the past-tense suffix. However, they are not roots, because they can be analyzed into two parts, -duce, plus a derivational prefix re- or de-. . . .
  
  "So some roots are stems and some stems are roots . . ., but roots and stems are not the same thing. There are roots that are not stems (-duce) and there are stems that are not roots (reduce). In fact, this rather subtle distinction is not extremely important conceptually, and some theories do away with it entirely."
  (Thomas Payne, Exploring Language Structure: A Student's Guide. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006)

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• Irregular Plurals
  "Once there was a song about a purple-people-eater, but it would be ungrammatical to sing about a purple-babies-eater. Since the licit irregular plurals and the illicit regular plurals have similar meanings, it must be the grammar of irregularity that makes the difference.
  
  "The theory of word structure explains the effect easily. Irregular plurals, because they are quirky, have to be stored in the mental dictionary as roots or stems; they cannot be generated by a rule. Because of this storage, they can be fed into the compounding rule that joins an existing stem to another existing stem to yield a new stem. But regular plurals are not stems stored in the mental dictionary; they are complex words that are assembled on the fly by inflectional rules whenever they are needed. They are put together too late in the root-to-stem-to-word assembly process to be available to the compounding rule, whose inputs can only come out of the dictionary."
  (Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. William Morrow, 1994)