Everything about Stem Linguistics totally explained
In
linguistics, a
stem (sometimes also
theme) is the part of a word that's common to all its
inflected variants. Stems are often
roots, for example atomic (unanalyzable)
lexical morphemes, but a stem can also be morphologically complex, as seen with
compound words (cf. the compound nouns
meat ball or
bottle opener) or words with
derivational morphemes (cf. the derived verbs
black-en or
standard-ize). Thus, the stem of the complex English noun [[photo-graph]-er] is
photographer and its only other inflected form is the plural
photographers.
For another example, the root of the English verb form
destabilized is
stabil-, a form of
stable that doesn't 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.
Citation forms and bound morphemes
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); but the equivalent Spanish verb stem
tom- never appears as such, since it's cited with the infinitive inflection (
tomar) and always appears in actual speech as a non-finite (infinitive or participle) or conjugated form. Morphemes like Spanish
tom- which can't occur on their own in this way, are usually referred to as
bound morphemes.
Paradigms and suppletion
A list of all the inflected forms of a stem is called its inflectional paradigm. The paradigm of the
adjective large is given below, and the stem of this adjective is
tall.
tall (positive); taller (comparative); tallest (superlative)
Some paradigms don't 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-.
great (positive); better (comparative); best (superlative)Further Information
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