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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 www.teranews.com">http://www.teranews.com
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