Stem

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Stem is a term which is commonly used for the uninflected part of a word. A stem is a morphological constituent to which affixes may be attached or to which morphological operations may be applied.

  • "A stem is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an affix can be added." (Gleason 1955:59)

Example

? The following part is missing or incomplete: correct greek spellings.
Please do not remove this block until the problem is fixed.

If we take the plural form disagreements, the form disagreement is called the stem. In languages such as Ancient Greek, in which words belong to different declensional or conjugational classes (marked by a theme or extension), the stem includes these extensions. For example, Ancient Greek declension I nouns are formed by adding the vowel a to the root géphur+a- 'bridge', while declension II nouns are formed by adding the vowel o to the root hípp+o- 'horse'. The inflectional endings for case and number are added to these forms. Traditionally, the forms géphura- and hippo- are called stems, while géphur- and hipp- are called roots.

Links

Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

Reference

Gleason, H. Allan. 1955. An introduction to descriptive linguistics. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Other languages

German Stamm