Word stem

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Examples
The stem of the verb wait is wait: it is the part that is common to all its inflected variants.
  1. wait (infinitive)
  2. wait (imperative)
  3. waits (present, 3rd person, singular)
  4. wait (present, other persons and/or plural)
  5. waited (simple past)
  6. waited (past participle)
  7. waiting (progressive)

In linguistics, a stem is a part of a word. The term is used with slightly different meanings.

In one usage, a stem is a form to which affixes can be attached.[1] Thus, in this usage, the English word friendships contains the stem friend, to which the derivational suffix -ship is attached to form a new stem friendship, to which the inflectional suffix -s is attached. In a variant of this usage, the root of the word (in the example, friend) is not counted as a stem.

In a slightly different usage, which is adopted in the remainder of this article, a word has a single stem, namely the part of the word that is common to all its inflected variants.[2] Thus, in this usage, all derivational affixes are part of the stem. For example, the stem of friendships is friendship, to which the inflectional suffix -s is attached.

Stems may be a root, e.g. run, or they may be morphologically complex, as in compound words (e.g. the compound nouns meat ball or bottle opener) or words with derivational morphemes (e.g. the derived verbs black-en or standard-ize). Hence, the stem of the complex English noun photographer is photo·graph·er, but not photo. For another example, the root of the English verb form destabilized is stabil-, a form of stable that does not occur alone; the stem is de·stabil·ize, which includes the derivational affixes de- and -ize, but not the inflectional past tense suffix -(e)d. That is, a stem is that part of a word that inflectional affixes attach to.

The exact use of the word 'stem' depends on the morphology of the language in question. In Athabaskan linguistics, for example, a verb stem is a root that cannot appear on its own, and that carries the tone of the word. Athabaskan verbs typically have two stems in this analysis, each preceded by prefixes.

Uncovering and analyzing cognation between stems and roots within and across languages has allowed comparative philology and comparative linguistics to determine the history of languages and language families.[3]

Citation forms and bound morphemes[edit]

Main article: Lemma (morphology)

In languages with very little inflection, such as English and Chinese, the stem is usually not distinct from the "normal" form of the word (the lemma, citation or dictionary form). However, in other languages, stems may rarely or never occur on their own. For example, the English verb stem run is indistinguishable from its present tense form (except in the third person singular). However, the equivalent Spanish verb stem corr- never appears as such because it is cited with the infinitive inflection (correr) and always appears in actual speech as a non-finite (infinitive or participle) or conjugated form. Such morphemes that cannot occur on their own in this way are usually referred to as bound morphemes.

In computational linguistics, the term "stem: is used for the part of the word that never changes, even morphologically, when inflected, and a lemma is the base form of the word.[citation needed] For example, given the word "produced", its lemma (linguistics) is "produce", but the stem is "produc" because of the inflected form "producing".

Paradigms and suppletion[edit]

A list of all the inflected forms of a stem is called its inflectional paradigm. The paradigm of the adjective tall is given below, and the stem of this adjective is tall.

  • tall (positive); taller (comparative); tallest (superlative)

Some paradigms do not make use of the same stem throughout; this phenomenon is called suppletion. An example of a suppletive paradigm is the paradigm for the adjective good: its stem changes from good to the bound morpheme bet-.

  • good (positive); better (comparative); best (superlative)

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Geoffrey Sampson; Paul Martin Postal (2005). The 'language instinct' debate. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 124. ISBN 978-0-8264-7385-1. Retrieved 2009-07-21.
  2. ^ Paul Kroeger (2005). Analyzing grammar. Cambridge University Press. p. 248. ISBN 978-0-521-81622-9. Retrieved 2009-07-21.
  3. ^ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Indo-European Roots Appendix, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  • What is a stem? - SIL International, Glossary of Linguistics Terms.
  • Bauer, Laurie (2003) Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Georgetown University Press; 2nd edition.
  • Williams, Edwin and Anna-Maria DiScullio (1987) On the definition of a word. Cambridge MA, MIT Press.

External links[edit]

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