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Word stem
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In linguistics, a stem (sometimes also theme) is the part of a word that is common to all its inflected variants. Stems are often roots, e.g. atomic, its root is atom, but its stem is atom·ic. A stem can 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).
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In linguistics, a stem (sometimes also theme) is the part of a word that is common to all its inflected variants. Stems are often roots, e.g. atomic, its root is atom, but its stem is atom·ic. A stem can 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 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 affixes attach to.
The exact use of the word 'stem' depends on the morphology of the language is 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.
A stem is the part of the word that never changes even when morphologically infected, 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.
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
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