Semantic POV: roots and affixes

A root is the lexical nucleus of a word bearing the major individual meaning common to a set of semantically related words, constituting one word-family, e.g. learn – learner – learned – learnable; heart, hearten, dishearten, heart-broken, hearty, kind-hearted etc. with which no grammatical properties of the word are connected. The peculiarity of English as a unique language is explained by its analytical language structure – morphemes are often homonymous with independent units (words). A morpheme that is homonymous with a word is called a root morpheme. A root is the ultimate constituent which remains after the removal of all functional and derivational affixes and does not admit any further analysis.

A stem is that part of the word that remains unchanged throughout its paradigm (formal aspect):

heart – hearts – to one’s heart’s content vs. hearty – heartier – the heartiest

It is the basic unit at the derivational level, taking the inflections that shape the word grammatically as a part of speech.

There are three types of stems: simple, derived and compound.

Simple stems are semantically non motivated and do not constitute a pattern on analogy with which new stems may be modeled: e.g. pocket, motion, receive. Simple stems are generally monomorphic and phonetically identical with the root morphemes (sell, grow, kink, etc.).

Derived stems are built on stems of various structures, they are motivated, i.e. derived stems are understood on the basis of the derivative relations between their immediate constituents and the correlated stems. Derived stems are mostly polymorphic (e.g. governments, unbelievable, etc.).

Compound stems are made up of two immediate constituents, both of which are themselves stems, e.g. match-box, pen-holder, ex-film-star, etc. It is built by joining two stems, one of which is simple, the other is derived.

The derivational types of words are classified according to the structure of their stems into simple, derived and compound words. Derived words are those composed of one root-morpheme and one or more derivational morphemes. Compound words have at least two root-morphemes, the number of derivational morphemes being insignificant.