Inlinguistics, aword stem is aword part responsible for a word'slexical meaning. The term is used with slightly different meanings depending on themorphology of the language in question. For instance, inAthabaskan linguistics, a verb stem is aroot that cannot appear on its own and that carries thetone of the word.
Typically, a stem remains unmodified duringinflection with few exceptions due toapophony (for example inPolish,miast-o ("city") andw mieść-e ("in the city"); in English,sing,sang, andsung, where it can be modified according to morphological rules or peculiarities, such assandhi).
Word stem comparisons acrosslanguages have helped revealcognates that have allowedcomparative linguists to determinelanguage families andtheir history.[1]
The wordfriendship is made by attaching themorpheme-ship to theroot wordfriend (which some linguists[2] also call a stem). While the inflectional plural morpheme-s can be attached tofriendship to formfriendships, it can not be attached to the rootfriend withinfriendship to formfriendsship. A stem is a base from which all itsinflected variants are formed.[3] For example, thestabil- (a variant ofstable unable to stand alone) is the root of thedestabilized, while the stem consists ofde·stabil·ize, includingde- and-ize. The-(e)d, on the other hand, is not part of the stem.
A stem can be a lone root, such as the verbrun; acompound of roots, such as the compound nounsmeatball andbottleneck; or aderivation with affixes, such as the verbsblacken andstandardize.
The stem of theverbto wait iswait: The stem is the word part that is common to all of its inflected variants.
In languages with very little inflection, such asEnglish andChinese, the stem is usually not distinct from the "normal" form of the word (the lemma, citation, or dictionary form). However, in other languages, word stems may rarely or never occur on their own. For example, the English verb stemrun is indistinguishable from its present tense form (except in the third person singular). However, the equivalentSpanish verb stemcorr- never appears as such because it is cited with the infinitive inflection (correr) and always appears in actual speech as a non-finite (infinitive or participle) or conjugated form. Such morphemes that cannot occur on their own in this way are usually referred to asbound morphemes.
Incomputational linguistics, the term "stem" is used for the part of the word that never changes, even morphologically, when inflected, and a lemma is the base form of the word.[citation needed] For example, given the word "produced", its lemma (linguistics) is "produce", but the stem is "produc-" because of the inflected form "producing".
A list of all the inflected forms of a word stem is called its inflectional paradigm. The paradigm of theadjectivetall is given below, and the stem of this adjective istall.
Some paradigms do not make use of the same stem throughout; this phenomenon is calledsuppletion. An example of a suppletive paradigm is the paradigm for the adjectivegood: its stem changes fromgood to the bound morphemebet-.
Both inLatin andGreek, thedeclension (inflection) of somenouns uses a different stem in theoblique cases than in thenominative andvocative singular cases. Such words belong to, respectively, the so-calledthird declension of the Latin grammar and the so-calledthird declension of the Ancient Greek grammar. For example, thegenitive singular is formed by adding-is (Latin) or -ος (Greek) to the oblique stem, and the genitive singular is conventionally listed in Greek and Latin dictionaries to illustrate the oblique.
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English words derived from Latin or Greek often involve the oblique stem:adipose,altitudinal,android, andmathematics.
Historically, the difference in stems arose due to sound changes in the nominative. In the Latin third declension, for example, the nominative singular suffix-s is combined with a stem-final consonant. If that consonant wasc, the result wasx (a mere orthographic change), while if it wasg, the-s caused it todevoice, again resulting inx. If the stem-final consonant was anotheralveolar consonant (t, d, r), it elided before the-s. In a later era,n before the nominative ending was also lost, producing pairs likeatlas, atlant- (for EnglishAtlas,Atlantic).
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