What is the stem of a word in english

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In linguistics, a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. The term is used with slightly different meanings depending 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.

In most cases, a word stem is not modified during its declension, while in some languages it can be modified (apophony) according to certain morphological rules or peculiarities, such as sandhi. For example in Polish: miast-o («city»), but w mieść-e («in the city»). In English: «sing», «sang», «sung».

Uncovering and analyzing cognation between word stems and roots within and across languages has allowed comparative philology and comparative linguistics to determine the history of languages and language families.^[1]

Usage[edit]

In one usage, a word stem is a form to which affixes can be attached.^[2] Thus, in this usage, the English word friendships contains the word 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 the example, the variant contains the stem friendship, where -s is attached).

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.^[3] 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.

Word stems may be a root, e.g. run, or they may be morphologically complex, as in compound words (e.g. the compound nouns meatball or bottleneck) 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.

For example, 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 people, singular)
4. wait (present, other persons and/or plural)
5. waited (simple past)
6. waited (past participle)
7. waiting (progressive)

Citation forms and bound morphemes[edit]

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, word 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 word 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)

Oblique stem [edit]

Both in Latin and in Greek, the declension (inflection) of some nouns uses a different stem in the oblique cases than in the nominative and vocative singular cases. Such words belong to, respectively, the so-called third declension of the Latin grammar and the so-called third declension of the Ancient Greek grammar. For example, the genitive singular is formed by adding -is (Latin) or -ος (Greek) to the oblique stem, and the genitive singular is conventionally listed in Greek and Latin dictionaries to illustrate the oblique.

Examples[edit]

English words derived from Latin or Greek often involve the oblique stem: adipose, altitudinal, android, mathematics.

Historically, the difference in stems arose due to sound change in the nominative. In the Latin third declension, for example, the nominative singular suffix -s combined with a stem-final consonant. If that consonant was c, the result was x (a mere orthographic change), while if it was g, the -s caused it to devoice, again resulting in x. If the stem-final consonant was another alveolar consonant (t, d, r), it elided before the -s. In a later era, n before the nominative ending was also lost, producing pairs like atlas, atlant- (for English Atlas, Atlantic).

See also[edit]

• Lemma (morphology)
• Lexeme
• Morphological typology
• Morphology (linguistics)
• Principal parts
• Root (linguistics)
• Stemming algorithms (computer science)
• Thematic vowel

References[edit]

• What is a stem? — SIL International, Glossary of Linguistic 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]

• Searchable reference for word stems including affixes (prefixes and suffixes)

In English grammar and morphology, a stem is the form of a word before any inflectional affixes are added. In English, most stems also qualify as words.

The term base is commonly used by linguists to refer to any stem (or root) to which an affix is attached.

Identifying a Stem

«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 University Press, 2010)

Combining Stems

«The three main morphological processes are compounding, affixation, and conversion. Compounding involves adding two stems together, as in the above 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.»
(Rodney D. Huddleston, English Grammar: An Outline. Cambridge University Press, 1988)

Stem Conversion

«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 University Press, 1988)

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 University Press, 2006)

​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)

Examples
The stem of the verb wait is wait: it is the part that is common to all its inflected variants. wait (infinitive) wait (imperative) waits (present, 3rd person, singluar) wait (present, other persons and/or plural) waited (simple past) waited (past participle) 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 roots, e.g. run, or they may be morphologically complex, as in 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 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.

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 corr- never appears as such, since it is cited with the infinitive inflection (correr) and always appears in actual speech as a non-finite (infinitive or participle) or conjugated form. Morphemes like Spanish corr- which can’t occur on their own in this way, are usually referred to as bound morphemes.

In computational linguistics, a stem is the part of the word that never changes even when morphologically inflected, whilst a lemma is the base form of the verb. For example, given the word «produced», its lemma (linguistics) is «produce», however the stem is «produc»: this is because there are words such as production. ^[3]

Paradigms and suppletion

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

• Lemma (morphology)
• Lexeme
• Morphological typology
• Morphology (linguistics)
• Principal parts
• Root (linguistics)
• Stemming algorithms (Computer science)
• Vowel stems

References

• 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

• Searchable reference for word stems including affixes (prefixes and suffixes)

The
modern approach to word studies is based on distinguishing between
the external
and
the
internal structures
of the word.

By
external
structure of the word we
mean its morphological
structure.
For example, in the word post-impressionists
the
following morphemes can be distinguished: the prefixes post-,
im-, the
root press,
the
noun-forming suffixes —ion,
—ist,
and the grammatical suffix of plurality -s.
All these morphemes constitute the external structure of the word
post-impressionists.

The
internal
structure of the word, or
its meaning,
is
commonly referred to as the word’s semantic
structure. This
is the word’s main aspect. Words can serve the purposes of human
communication solely due to their meanings.

The
area of lexicology specializing in the semantic studies of the word
is called semantics.

Another
structural aspect of the word is its unity.
The word possesses both external (or formal) unity and semantic
unity. Formal unity of the word is sometimes interpreted as
indivisibility. The example of post-impressionists
has
already shown that the word is not indivisible. Yet, its component
morphemes are permanently linked together in opposition to
word-groups, both free and with fixed contexts, whose components
possess a certain structural freedom, e.g. bright
light, to take for granted.

The
formal unity of the word can best be illustrated by comparing a word
and a word-group comprising identical constituents. The difference
between a
blackbird and
a black bird is
explained by their relationship with the grammatical system of the
language. The word blackbird,
which
is characterized by unity, possesses a single grammatical framing:
blackbird/s.
The
first constituent black
is
not subject to any grammatical changes. In the word-group a black
bird each
constituent can acquire grammatical forms of its own: the
blackest birds I’ve ever seen. Other
words can be inserted between the components: a
black night bird.

The
same example may be used to illustrate what we mean by semantic
unity.

In
the word-group a black
bird each
of the meaningful words conveys a separate concept: bird
– a
kind of living creature; black
– a
colour.

The
word blackbird
conveys
only one concept: the type of bird. This is one of the main features
of any word: it always conveys one concept, no matter how many
component morphemes it may have in its external structure.

A
further structural feature of the word is its susceptibility
to
grammatical employment. In speech most words can be used in different
grammatical forms in which their interrelations are realized.

All
that we have said about the word can be summed up as follows.

The
word
is
a speech unit used for the purposes of human communication,
materially representing a group of sounds, possessing a meaning,
susceptible to grammatical employment and characterized by formal and
semantic unity.

1. The main problems of lexicology

Two
of these have been already underlined. The
problem of word-building is
associated with prevailing morphological word-structures and with
processes of making new words. Semantics
is
the study of meaning. Modern approaches to this problem are
characterized by two different levels of study: syntagmatic
and
paradigmatic.

On
the syntagmatic
level, the
semantic structure of the word is analysed in its linear
relationships with neighbouring words in connected speech. In other
words, the semantic characteristics of the word are observed,
described and studied on the basis of its typical contexts.

On
the paradigmatic
level, the
word is studied in its relationships with other words in the
vocabulary system. So, a word may be studied in comparison with other
words of similar meaning. E.g. work
n – labour
n.
Work работа,
труд; 1
the
job that a person does especially in order to earn money. This word
has many meanings (in
Oxford Dictionary – 14),
many synonyms and idioms [`idiemz]: creative
work творческая
деятельность; public
work общественные
работы;
his life`s work дело
его жизни; dirty
work (difficult,
unpleasant) 1
чёрная работа; 2
грязное
дело, подлость.
Nice
work! Отлично!
Здорово!
Saying (поговорка):
All
work and no play makes Jack a dull boy (мешай
дело с бездельем, проживёшь век с
весельем)
–
it is not healthy to spend all your time working; you need to relax
too.

Labour:
“work”
и “labour” не взаимозаменимы; labour
– 1 work,
especially physical work: manual
labour,
a
labour camp
– исправительно-трудовой
лагерь; 2
people
who work: a
shortage of labour; cheap labour; skilled labour –
квалифицированные
рабочие, Labour
Party; labour relations; a labour of
Sisyphus;
Sisyphean
labour [,sisi‘fi:en]
сизифов труд; тяжёлый и бесплодный труд
– of a task impossible to complete. From the Greek myth in which
Sisyphus was punished for the bad things he had done in his life with
the never-ending task of rolling a large stone to the top of a hill,
from which it always rolled down again.

Other
words of similar meaning (e.g. to
refuse v – to reject v),
of
opposite meaning (e.g. busy
adj – idle adj; to accept v – to reject v),
of
different stylistic characteristics (e.g. man
n – chap n – bloke n – guy n).
Man
–
chap
(coll.)
–
парень, малый; a
good chap
–
славный малый; old
chap – старина;
chap
– BrE,
informal,
becoming old-fashioned – used to talk about a man in a friendly
way: He
isn`t such a bad chap really. Bloke
(coll.)
тип,
парень: He
seemed like a nice bloke.
Guy
– coll.
US – малый;
tough
guy железный
малый; wise
guy умник;
guys
(informal,
especially US) a
group of people of either sex: Come
on, you guys!

Consequently,
the main problems of paradigmatic studies are synonymy,
antonymy, functional styles.

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1. Morphemes. Free and bound forms. Affixes and their function

2. Aims and principles of structural analysis. Derivational and structural analysis

3. Semi-affixes. Allomorphs

I

If
we describe a word as an autonomous unit of language in which a given
meaning is associated with a given grammatical employment and able to
form a sentence by itself, we have a possibility to distinguish it
from fundamental language unit, namely the morpheme.

A
morpheme is
also an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern.
But it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only as
constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may
consist of a single morpheme. They are also indivisible into smaller
meaningful units. That’s why the morpheme may be defined as the
minimum meaningful language unit.

The
term morpheme is derived from Gr. — `morphe` `form` + eme. The Greek
suffix – eme has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest
unit or the minimum distinctive feature (phoneme).

The
morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of form. A form in these
cases is a recurring discrete unit of speech.

A
form is said to be free
if it may stand alone without changing its meaning; if not, it is
bound
form, so called because it is always bound to something else. A word
is by Bloomfield’s definition a minimum free form.

A
morpheme is said to be bound or free. It means that some morphemes
are capable of forming words without adding other morphemes, that is
they are homonymous to free forms.

According
to the role they play in forming words morphemes are subdivided into
roots and affixes. Affixes are subdivided into (according to their
position) prefixes, suffixes and infixes, (according to their
function and meaning) – derivational and functional affixes
(endings or other formatives).

When
we strip derivational or functional suffixes from the word, what
remains is a stem or a stem base.

E.g.
for the word hearty, and for paradigm heart’s hearts (pl) the stem
is heart.

This
stem is a single morpheme, it contains nothing but the root, so it is
a simple stem. It is also a free stem, because it is homonymous to
the word heart.

A
stem
may be defined as the part of the word which remains unchanged
throughout its paradigm.

E.g.
the stem of the paradigm Hearty – heartier, the heartiest is
hearty.

It
is a free stem but not simple but derived as it consists of root
morpheme + an affix.

If
after reducing the affix the remaining form is not homonymous to a
separate word of the same root, we call it a
bound stem.

Thus
in the word cordial (proceeding as if from the heart) the
adjective-forming suffix can be separated on the analogy with such
word as bronchial,
radial,
social.
The remaining stem can not form a separate word by itself: it is
bound. In cordially, cordiality, on the other hand the stems are
free.

Bound
stems are especially characteristic of loan words. The point may be
illustrated by the following French borrowings: arrogance, charity,
courage, coward, distort, involve, notion, legible and tolerable, to
give but a few. After the suffixes of these words are taken away the
remaining elements are: -char-, -cour-, -cow-, -tort- etc., which do
not coincide with any semantically related independent words.

It
should be noted that the root in English is often homonymous with the
word. This fact is of fundamental importance as it is one of the most
specific features of the English language arising from its general
grammatical system on the one hand, and from its phonemic system on
the other. The influence of the analytical structure of the language
is obvious. The second point calls for explanation. The usual
phonemic shape most favoured in English is one single stressed
syllable: bear, find, land, man, single… This doesn’t give much
space for the second morpheme to add classifying lexico-grammatical
meaning to the lexical meaning already present in the root-stem, so
the lexico-grammatical meaning must be signaled by distribution.

E.g.
In the phrases a morning’s drive, a morning’s ride, a morning’s
walk, the words drive, ride and walk receive the lex-grm. meaning of
a noun because they are preceded by a + N’s and not due to the
structure of their stems.

An
English word doesn’t necessarily contain formatives indicating to
what part of speech it belongs. This holds true, even with respect to
inflectable parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. Not all
roots are free forms, but productive roots, roots capable of
producing new words, usually are. The semantic realization of an
English word is very specific. Its dependence on distribution is
further enhanced by the widespread occurrence of homonymy both among
root morphemes and affixes. Note how many words in the following
statement might be ambiguous if taken in isolation: a change of work
is as good as a rest.

Unlike
roots, affixes are always bound forms. The difference between
suffixes and prefixes is not in their position only, but also it
concerns their function and meaning.

A
suffix

is a derivational morpheme following the root and forming a new
derivative in a different part of speech or a different word class.
When both forms belong to the same part of speech, the suffix serve
to differentiate between lex-grammatical classes by rendering some
very general lex-grammatical meaning.

E.g.
both – ify and –er are verb suffixes, but the first characterizes
causative verbs, such as horrify, purify, when the second is mostly
typical of frequentative verbs: flicker, shimmer, twitter and the
like.

A
prefix is a derivational morpheme standing before the root and
modifying meaning, to hearten – to dishearten. It is only with
verbs and statives that a prefix may serve to distinguish one part
of speech from another, like in earth (n) – unearth (v), sleep (n,
v) – asleep (stative).

Preceding
a verb stem, some prefixes express the difference between a
transitive and an intransitive verb: stay (v.i) and outstay (smb.
v.t.). With a few exceptions some prefixes modify the stem for time
(pre-, post), place (in, ad-), negation (un-, dis-).

E.g.
postpone, advent, unwrap, preced, inhume,
inhabit, dislike.

An
infix is an affix placed within a combining form word, like –n –
in stand. The type is not productive.

An
affix shouldn’t be confused with a combining form. A
combining form
is also a bound form but it can be distinguished from an affix
historically by the fact that it is always borrowed from another
language, namely from Latin or Greek, in which existed as a free
form, a separated word, or also a combining form.

E.g.
From Greek word kuklos
– the combining form cyclo -, or cycl – the English word cyclic.

They
differ from all other borrowings in that they occur in compounds and
derivatives that do not exist in their original language but were
formed only in mode times.

II

A
structural word formation analysis studies the structural correlation
with other words, the structural patterns or rules on which words are
built.

A
binary opposition
comprises two elements. A correlation is a set of binary oppositions.
It is composed of two subsets formed by the first and the second
elements of each couple; i.e. opposition. Each element of the first
set is coupled with exactly one element of the second set and vice
versa. Each second element may be derived from the corresponding
first element by a general rule valid for all members of the
correlation. Observing the proportional opposition:

Child

= woman

= monkey

= book

= spinster

Childish
womanish monkeyish bookish
spinsterish

it
is possible to conclude, that there is in English a type of direct
adjectives consisting of a noun stem and a suffix – ish.
Observation also shows that the stems are mostly those of animate
nouns, and permites us to define the relationship between the
structural pattern of the word and its meaning. Any word built
according to this pattern contains a semantic component common to the
whole group, namely: “typical of, or having the bad qualities of”.

In
this example the results of morphemic and the structural
word-formational analysis practically coincide. But there are cases
when they are of necessity separated.

The
morphemic analysis, for instance, insufficient in showing the
difference between the structure of inconvenience
and impatience
classifies both as derivatives. From the point of view of
word-formation pattern, they are fundamentally different. It is only
the second that is formed by derivation. Compare:

Impatience
n
= patience
n
= corpulence
n

Impatient
a patient a corpulent a

The
correlation that can be established for the verb inconvenience is
different:

Inconvenience
v =
pain
v =
disgust
v
= etc.

Inconvenience
n pain n disgust n

Here
nouns denoting some feeling or state are correlated with verbs
causing this feeling or state, there being no difference in stems
between the members of each separate opposition.

There
is another type of analysis which permits us to obtain the morphemic
structure and provides the basis for further word-formation analysis
(immediate constituents).

E.g.
1. un-gentlemanly 3. un-gentle-man-ly

2.
un-gentleman-ly 4. un-gent-le-man-ly

Lexicology
I primary concerned with derivational affixes, the other group being
the domain of grammarians. The derivational affixes in fact, as well
as the whole problem of word formation, form a boundary area between
Lexicology and Grammar and are therefore studied in both.

It
is impossible to have a complete study of affixes without some
discussion of the similarity and difference between derivational and
functional morphemes. They are similar very often as they are often
homonymous. On the other hand they are quite different as they render
different types of meaning.

Functional
affixes
serve to convey grammatical meaning. They build different forms of
one and the same word – a paradigm therefore is defined as the
system of grammatical forms characteristic of a word.

Derivational
affixes
serve to supply the stem with components of lexical and
lexico-grammatical meaning and form different words. One and the same
lex-gram. meanining of the affix is sometimes accompanied by
different combinations of various lexical meanings.

E.g.
the lex-grammatical meaning supplied by the suffix –y consists in
the ability to express the qualitative idea peculiar to adjectives
and creates adjectives from noun stems. The lexical meanings of the
same suffix are somewhat variegated “full of”, as in bushy or
cloudy, “composed of” stony. The same suffix may convey emotional
components of meaning. Bosssy (in Ch. Dickens) not like boss but it
is also an unkind derogatory word.

Various
kinds of morphemes are also different positionally. A functional
affix marks the word boundary, it can only follow the affix of
derivation and come last, so that no further derivation is possible
for a stem to which a functional affix is added. That is why the
functional affixes are called by Nida the outer formatives as
contrasted to the inner formatives which is equivalent to our term
derivational affixes.

It
might be argued that the outer position of the functional affixes is
disapproved by such examples as the disableds, the unwanteds. It must
be noted, that in these words –ed is not a functional affix, it
receives derivational force so that the disableds is not a form of
the verb to disable, but a new word – a collective noun.

A
word containing no outer formatives is considered open, because it is
homonymous to a stem and further derivational affixes may be added to
it: boy – boyish, boyish – boyishness. But once we add an outer
formative, no further derivation is possible. The form boys is not
homonymous to a stem and cannot constitute the underlying form for a
new derivative. The form may be regarded as closed.

To
sum up: derivational and functional morphemes may happen to be
identical in sound form, but they are substantially different in
meaning, function, valency, statistical characteristics and
structural properties.

III

There
are cases, where it is very difficult to draw a hard and fast line
between roots and affixes on the one hand and derivational suffixes
and inflexional formatives on the other. There are a few roots in
English which are usually in the position of the second element of a
word and have a very general meaning similar to that of an affix.
These are semi-affixes (because semantically, functionally,
structurally they are more like affixes than like roots). Their
meaning is as general. They determine to what lex-grammatical class
the word belongs.

E.g.
sailor – seaman, where man is a semi-affix.

The
combining form allo – from Greek – allos –“other” is used
in linguistic terminology to denote elements of a group whose members
together constitute a structural unit of the language (allophones,
allomorphs).

Thus,
for example, -ion/ -tion/ -sion/ -ation are the positional variants
of the same suffix. They do not differ in meaning or function but
show a slight difference in sound form depending on the final phoneme
of the preceding stem. They are considered as variants of one and the
same morpheme and called its allomorphs.

An
allomorph
is defined as positional variant of a morpheme occurring in a
specific environment and so characterized by complementary
distribution.

Complementary
distribution
is said to take place when two linguistic variants cannot appear in
the same environment. Thus, stems ending in consonants take as a rule
–ation (liberation); stems ending in –pt, however, take –tion
(corruption) and the final t becomes fused with the suffix.

Different
morphemes are characterized by contrastive distribution, if they
occur in the same environment they signal different meanings.

For
instance, the suffix –able and –ed are different morphemes, not
allomorphs, because adjectives in –able mean “capable of being”:
measurable – capable of being measured, whereas –ed as a suffix
has a resultant force; “measured – marked by due proportion”,
as “the pressured beauty of classical Greek art”.

In
some cases the difference is not very clear-cut. –ic and –ical,
for example are two different affixes, the first is a simple one, the
second – a group affix; They are characterized by contrastive
distribution. COD points out that the suffix –ical shows a vaguer
connection with what is indicated by the stem: comic paper – but –
comical story. Here the distinction between them is not very sharp.

Allomorph
will also occur among prefixes.

E.g.
impossible,
irregular,
indirect.

In
American descriptive linguistics allomorphs are treated on a purely
semantic basis, so not only [iz] in dishes, [z] in dreams, [s] in
books, which are allomorphs in the given sense, but also formally
unrelated [en] oxen, the vowel modification in tooth-teeth; and zero
suffix in many sheep are considered to be allomorphs of the same
morpheme on the strength of the sameness of their grammatical
meaning.

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