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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. For English usage of verbs see the wiki article English verbs.
  1. wait (infinitive)
  2. wait (imperative)
  3. waits (present, 3rd person, singluar)
  4. wait (present, other persons and/or plural)
  5. waited (simple past)
  6. waited (past participle)
  7. waiting (progressive)

In linguistics, a stem (sometimes also theme) is the part of a word that is common to all its inflected variants. Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields In Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice Stems are often roots, i. The root is the primary lexical unit of a Word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents e. atomic (unanalyzable) lexical morphemes, but a stem can also be morphologically complex, as seen with compound words (cf. In Grammar, a lexical category (also word class, lexical class, or in traditional grammar part of speech) is a linguistic category of words (or In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. In Linguistics, a compound is a Lexeme (less precisely a Word) that consists of more than one stem. the compound nouns meat ball or bottle opener) or words with derivational morphemes (cf. In Linguistics, derivation is "Used to form new words as with happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from 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 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.

Contents

Citation forms and bound morphemes

Main article: Lemma (linguistics)

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). In Linguistics a lemma (plural lemmas or lemmata) has two distinct interpretations morphology / Lexicography: the 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.

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. In Grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a Noun or Pronoun, giving more information about the

Some paradigms do not make use of the same stem throughout; this phenomenon is called suppletion. In Linguistics and Etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words An example of a suppletive paradigm is the paradigm for the adjective good: its stem changes from good to the bound morpheme bet-.

References

See also

External links

In Linguistics a lemma (plural lemmas or lemmata) has two distinct interpretations morphology / Lexicography: the For its use in the context of Computer Science see Lexical analysis. This is a list of Proto-Semitic stems ( Triconsonantal roots and extensions with their reflexes in several Semitic languages (i Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see Linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common morphological structures Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words In Language learning the principal parts of a Verb are those forms that a student must memorize in order to be able to conjugate the verb through all its The root is the primary lexical unit of a Word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents Stemming is the process for reducing inflected (or sometimes derived words to their stem, base or root form &ndash generally a written word form In Indo-European linguistics, a vowel stem is a Noun or Verb stem that ends in a vowel that appears in or otherwise influences the noun or verb's Inflectional
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