TYPES OF MORPHOLOGY

ROOTS, AFFIXES, STEMS AND BASES

ROOTS

A root is the irreducible core of a Word, with absolutely nothing else attached to it. It is the part that is always present, possibly with some modification, in the various manifestations of a lexeme. For example, walk is a root and it a appears in the set of word-forms that instantiate the lexeme WALK such as walk, walks, walking and walked.

The only situation where this is not true is when suppletion takes place. In that case, word-forms that represent the same morpheme do not share a common root morpheme. Thus, although both the word –forms good and better realise the lexeme GOOD, only good is phonetically similar to GOOD.

Many words contain a root standing on its own. Roots which are capable of standing independently are called free morphemes, for example:

Free morphemes

• Man   book   tea    sweet   cook
• Bet     very    aardvark    pain   walk

AFIXES

An affix is a morpheme which only occurs when attached to some other morpheme such as a root or stem or base. Obviously, by definition affixes are bound morphemes. No word  may contain only an affix standing on its own, like *-s or * -al or even a number of affixes strung  together like *-al-s.

There are three types of affixes. We will consider them in turn.

PREFIXES

A prefix  is an affix attached before  a root or stem or base like re-, un- and in-.

• Re-make  un-kind in-decnt
• Re-read un-tidy in-accurate

SUFFIXES

A suffix is an affix attached after a root (or stem base) like –ly, -er, ist, -s, -ing and –ed.

• Kind-ly    wait-er   book-s   walk-ed     jump-ed
• Quick-ly   play-er   mat-s  jump-ed

INFIXES

An infix is an affix inserted into the root itself. Infixes are very common in Semitic language like Arabic and Hebrew. But infixing is somewhere rare in English. Sloat and Taylor (1978) suggest that the only infix that occurs in English morphology is /-n-/ which is inserted  before the last consonant of the root in a few words of Latin origin, on what appears to be an arbitrary basis.

This infix undergoes place of articulation assimilation. Thus, the root –cub- meaning  “lie in, on or upon” occurs without [m] before the [b] in some words containing that root, e.g. incubate, incubus, concubine and succubus. But [m] is infixed before that same root in some other words like incumbent, succumb, and decumbent. This infix is a frozen historical relic from Latin.

In fact, infixation of sorts still happens in contemporary English.  Example.

a.    Kalamazu (places name)     → Kalama-goddam-zoo

Instantiate (verb)                  → in-fuckin-stantiate

b.    Kangaroo                                → kanga-bloody-roo

Impossible                              → in-fuckin-possible

Guarantee                              → guaran-friggin-tee

(Recall that the arrow → means “becomes” or is “re-written as”.)

As you can see, in present-day English infixation, not of an affix morpheme  but of  an entire word (which may have more than one morpheme, blood-y, fuck-ing) is actively used to form words. Curiously, this infixation is virtually restricted to inserting expletives into words in expressive language that one would probably not use in polite company. 

ROOTS, STEMS AND BASES

The stem is that part of a word that is in existence before any inflectional affixes (those affixes whose presence is required by the syntax such as markers of singular and plural number in nouns, tense in verbs, etc.) have been added. Inflection is discussed in section. For the moment a few examples should suffice.

Noun stem      Plural

Cat                     -s

Worker             -s

In the word-form cats, the plural inflectional suffix –s is attached to the simple stem cat, which is a bare root, the irreducible core of the word.

In workers the same inflectional  -s suffix comes after a slightly more complex stem consisting of the root work  plus the suffix -er which is used to the form nouns from verbs (with the meaning “someone who does the action designated by the verb (worker). Here work is the root, but worker is the stem to which -s is attached.

Finally  a base is any unit whatsoever to which affixes of any kind can be added. The affixes attached to a base may be inflectional affixes selected for syntactic reasons or derivational affixes which alter the meaning or grammatical category of the base. An unadorned root like boy can be a base since it can have attached to it inflectional affixes like -s to form the plural boys or derivational affixes like -ish to turn the noun boy into the adjective boyish. In other words, all roots are bases. Bases are called stems only in the context of inflectional morphology.

STEM EXTENDERS  

In the last chapter we saw that languages sometimes have word-building elements that are devoid of content. Such empty formatives are often referred to, somewhat inappropriately, as empty morphs.

In English empty formatives are interposed between the root, base or stem and an affix. For instance, while the irregular plural allomorph -en is attached directly to the stem ox to form ox-en, in the formation of chil-r-nen and breth-r-en it can only be added after the stem has been extended by attaching  -r- to child- and breth-. Hence, the name stem extender for this type of formative.

The use of stem extenders may not be entirely arbitrary. There may be a good historical reason for the use of particular stem extenders before certain affixes. To some extent, current word-formation rules reflect the history of the language.

The history of stem extender -r- is instructive. A small number of nouns in Old English formed their plural by adding –er. The word “child” was cild in the singular and cilder in the plural (a form that has survived in some conservative North of England dialects, and is spelled childer). But later, -en was added as an additional plural ending. Eventually -er lost its value as a marker of plural and it simply became a stem extender:

Singular                Plural         New Singular           Plural

Cild  “child”         cild-er        cilder                         cilder-en          

This topic is very interesting but also very complicated and we consider the part of morphemes, suffixes and affixes is the most important morphology.  

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

MODERN LINGUISTICS

MORPHOLOGY

FRANCIS KATAMBA

EDITORS: PALGRAVE.