Re: stem or root?

In article <4lj1vkF258ckU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nathan Sanders wrote:
In article
<Pine.LNX.4.63.0608291413380.2325@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Helmut Richter <hhr-m@xxxxxx> wrote:

Besides their more special meanings, the words "stem" and "root" are both
used to denote the core part of a word to which affixes are attached. Are
the two words synonymous in this context?

In the German language, there are many words that look as if they had an
affix (mostly a suffix) but this affix appears in each cognate word, e.g.
"Wagen" with the suffix "-en", but all not to distant cognates contain the
n of the suffix, e.g. "Wagner". The "-(e)n" thus belongs to the word
itself and is not an *additional* affix. Would one say that it is part of
the root? Or that it is part of the word stem?

Without being sure about the correct terminology, I would consider it part
of the root but not part of the stem, but I want to check whether my
terminology is correct in this point.

A root is the innermost morpheme of a word (no affixes) that carries
the primary lexical content of the word, while a stem is a root or
stem plus an affix (thus, each affix creates a new stem).

The inflectional stem is specifically the stem that consists of the
root plus all and only the derivational affixes in the word. Many
people use "stem" to refer only to the inflectional stem.

In your example, "Wag" would be the root (and perhaps a zero-derived
stem, if inflectional affixes can be added to it alone), while "Wagen"
is a stem.

But "en" in "Wagen" isn't an affix. The fact that it reduces to "n" in
"Wagner" isn't different from the "y" in "city" changing to "ie" in
"cities", and the "y" certainly isn't an affix.

Oops, sorry, I completely misunderstood your example. In that case,
"Wag(e)n" is both a root and a suffix. "Wag" is nothing, unless is
appears in another word without "(e)n".

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

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Relevant Pages

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