PENGERTIAN ROOT, AFFIXES, STEM, BASES

1.      What is/are difference(s) between roots, affixes, stems and bases?

A.    According to Francis Katamba

A root is the irreducible core of a word, with absolutely nothing else attached to it. It is the part that is always present, possibly with some modification, in the various manifestations of a lexeme. For example, walk is a root and it appears in the set of word-forms that instantiate the lexeme WALK such as walk, walks, walking and walked. The only situation where this is not true is when suppletion takes place. In that case, word-forms that represent the same morpheme do not share a common root morpheme. Thus, although both the word-forms good and better realise the lexeme GOOD, only good is phonetically similar to GOOD.

An affix is a morpheme which only occurs when attached to some other morpheme or morphemes such as a root or stem or base. Obviously, by definition affixes are bound morphemes. No word may contain only an affix standing on its own, like *-s or *-ed or *-al or even a number of affixes strung together like *-al-s. There are three types of affixes. We will consider them in turn.

a.       Prefixes

A prefix is an affix attached before a root or stem or base like re-, un- andin-. For example: re-makeun-kindin-decent re-read un-tidy in-accurate.

b.      Suffixes

A suffix is an affix attached after a root (or stem or base) like -Iy, -er, -ist,-s, -ing and -ed.For example: kind-Iy wait-er book-s walk-ed quick-Iy play-er mat-s jump-ed.

c.       Infixes

An infix is an affix inserted into the root itself.This infix undergoes place of articulation assimilation, Thus, the root-cub- meaning 'lie in, on or upon' occurs without [m] before the [b] in somewords containing that root. Example:incubate,incubus, concubine and succubus.But [m] is infixed before that same root in some other words likeincumbent, succumb, and decumbent.

The stem is that part of a word that is in existence before any inflectional affixes have been added. Inflection is discussed in section. For example:

Noun stem       Plural

Cat                  -s

Worker            -s

 For the moment a few examples should suffice: In the word-form cats, the plural inflectional suffix -s is attached to the simple stem cat, which is a bare root, i.e. the irreducible core of the word. In workers the same inflectional -s suffix comes after a slightly more complex stem consisting of the root work plus the suffix -er which is used to form nouns from verbs. Here work is the root, but worker is the stem to which -s is attached.

A base is any unit whatsoever to which affixes of any kind can be added. The affixes attached to a base may be inflectional affixes selected for syntactic reasons or derivational affixes which alter the meaning or grammatical category of the base. An unadorned root like boy can be a base since it can have attached to it inflectional affixes like -s to form the plural boys or derivational affixes like -ish to tum the noun boy into the adjective boyish. In other words, all roots are bases. Bases are called stems only in the context of inflectional morphology. Example: faith, faithful, booksho.

B.     According to Mark Aronoff

A root is like a stem in constituting the core of the word to which other pieces attach, but the term refers only to morphologically simple units. For example, disagree is the stem of disagreement, because it is the base to which -ment attaches, but agree is the root. Taking disagree now, agree is both the stem to which dis- attaches and the root of the entire word.

A stem is a base unit to which another morphological piece is attached. The stem can be simple, made up of only one part, or complex, itself made up of more than one piece. Here it is best to consider consider a simple stem. Although it consists historically of more than one part, most present-day speakers would treat it as an unanalyzable form. We could also call consider the root.

2.      What do you know about morphemes, morhps and allomorphs?

A.    According to Francis Katamba

The morpheme is the smallest difference in the shape of a word that correlates with the smallest difference in word or sentence meaning or in grammatical structure. Example: If we divided up the word fee [fi:] (which contains just one morpheme) into, say, [f] and [i:], it would be impossible to say what each of the sounds [f] and [i:] means by itself since sounds in themselves do not have meaning.

The analysis of words into morphemes begins with the isolation of morphs. A morph is a physical form representing some morpheme in a language. It is a recurrent distinctive sound (phoneme) or sequence of sounds (phonemes). For example:

a. I parked the car.                  e. She parked the car.

b. We parkedthecar.                f. Sheparksthecar.

c. I park the car.                      g. We park the car.

d. He parks the car.                 h. He parked the car.

Different morphs represent the same morpheme, they are grouped together and they are called allomorphs of that morpheme. So, tu- and tware allomorphs of the 'first person plural' morpheme. (For simplicity's sake, for our present purposes, we are regarding 'first person plural' as a single unanalysable concept.) On the same grounds, /Id/, /d/ and /t/ Are grouped together as allomorphs of the past tense morpheme in English. For example: parked /Id/, cleaned /d/, missed/t/.

B.     According to Mark Aronoff and Kirsten Fudeman

The term ‘morph’ is sometimesused to refer specifically to the phonological realization of a morpheme.For example, the English past tense morpheme that we spell –edhas various morphs. It is realized as [t] after the voiceless [p] of jump (cf.jumped), as [d] after the voiced [l] of repel (cf. repelled), and as [ ed] afterthe voiceless [t] of root or the voiced [d] of wed (cf. rooted and wedded).We can also call these morphs allomorphs or variants. The appearanceof one morph over another in this case is determined by voicing and the place of articulation of the final consonant of the verb stem.

C.     According to Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy

Many morphemes have two or more different pronunciations, calledallomorphs, the choice between them being determined by the context.These include some of the commonest morphemes in the language, as Iwill illustrate directly. I will then discuss in more detail what aspects of the context can influence the choice of allomorph. How are the plurals of most English nouns formed? For Example: If one comparescats, dogs and horses with cat, dog and horse respectively, the obvious answeris: ‘by adding -s’.Allomorphy, concerned as it is with differences in how a morpheme is pronounced, may seem at first to have little connection with meaning.

3.      Please explain about phonological conditioning allomorphs and morphological conditioning allomorphs!

A.    According to Francis Katamba

A morpheme has several allomorphs, the choice of allomorph used in a given context is normally phonologically conditioned. This means that the allomorph selected to represent the morpheme in a particular context is one whose phonological properties are similar to those of sounds found in a neighbouring allomorph of some other morpheme. The phonological resemblance between the nasal in the prefix and the first consonant representing the morpheme before which it is placed is due to assimilation. The pronunciation of the nasal in the prefix is adjusted to match the place of articulation of the first consonant representing the next morpheme. Thus, in [2.12] the labial consonant [m] occurs in [rm] before a labial consonant, the alveolar consonant [n] in [rn] occurs before alveolar consonants and the velar consonant [g] in [rg] occurs before velar consonants. In each case the two consonants end up sharing the same place of articulation. This example also illustrates another point, namely that spelling is a very poor guide to pronunciation in English (and many other languages). Where the point at issue would otherwise be obscured by the standar? orthography, phonetic or phonemic transcription will be used as appropnate in this book. In the light of this discussion, let us return to the earlier example of the allomorphs of the English regular past tense morpheme in.

Clearly, the distribution of allomorphs is phonologically conditioned: /Id/ is chosen after the alveolar stops /t/ and /d/ (with hi being inserted to separate the alveolar stop of the suffix from the final alveolar stop of the verb to which it is attached); voiced /-d/ is chosen after voiced segments other than /d/ and voiceless /-t/ is chosen after voiceless consonants other than /t/. So far, all the examples of morphs that we have seen have involved only vowels and consonants. But, morphemes may also be signalled by tone.

Conclusion, In the case of the /s/, /z/, and / z/ allomorphs of the plural morphemes in cats, dogs, and judges, the /s/ occurs after a /t/, the /z/ after a /g/, and the / z/ after a /j/. When the distribution of the various allomorphs can be stated in terms of their phonemic environments, the allomorphs are said to be phonologically conditioned. We can economically explain the distribution of the allomorphs of not only the English "plural" but also the English "possessive" (cat's) and the verb "third person" (takes) morphemes at the same time.

In general, these allomorphs are all phonologically conditioned in addition to being homophones. The usual allomorphs of the "English plural", "possessive", and "third person" morphemes are / z/, which occurs after /ssczj/ (or after sibilants), /s/, which occurs after the remaining voiceless consonants, and /z/, which occurs elsewhere. When the "plural" morpheme is added to church /c rc/, the result is /c rc z/, when the possessive morpheme is added to snake /sneyk/, the result is /sneyks/, and when the third person morpheme is added to beg /beg/, the result is /begz/. In another pattern of phonological conditioning the usual allomorphs of the English "past tense" and "past participle" morphemes which occur with verbs, for example in baked, are / d/, which occurs after /td/, /t/ which occurs after the remaining voiceless consonants, and /d/, which occurs elsewhere. Phonological conditioning appears to be the most general and productive kind of conditioning of morphemic variants in languages.

Morphological conditioning allomorphs is the next section introduced the segmentation of words into the smallest abstract units of meaning or grammatical function. These units are called morphemes. We saw that the analysis of words into morphemes begins with the contrasting of pairs of utterances which are partially different in sound and meaning. Word-forms are segmented into morphs, which are recurrent physical word-forming chunks. Any morphs that represent the same meaning are grouped together as allomorphs of that morpheme. Meaning plays a role in this, but the main principle used is that of distribution.

Morphs are listed as allomorphs of the same morpheme if they are in complementary distribution, if they are realisations of the same morpheme in different contexts. (Sometimes a morpheme has a single allomorph.) Normally, the distribution of allomorphs is phonologically conditioned. The relationship between allomorphs has a phonetic motivation. A single underlying (base) form is postulated and the phonetic representation of the various allomorphs is derived from it using phonological rules. But sometimes allomorphs may be grammatically conditioned or even lexically conditioned, a particular allomorph is selected if either a particular grammatical element or a particular word is present.

Occasionally there is suppletion, which means that an allomorph bears no phonetic similarity to other allomorphs of the same morpheme. The last section dealt with the relationship between morphological and phonological representations. It was established that the relationship between morphemes on the one hand and morphs on the other, is one of representation (or realisation) rather than composition. The alternation in question is not the idiosyncratic property of anyone morpheme but rather a general phonological process in the language. The terms morphophonemics (in American linguistics) and morphophonology (European linguistics) are used to refer to rules of this kind that account for the realisation of phonologically conditioned allomorphs of morphemes. For Example, kind-er and the noun-forming suffix -er as inworker, which is formed from the verb work, or it can be a part of a word without a discernible meaning of its own, as in water.

Clearly, it is the morphs rather than morphemes that are made up of (sequences of) phonemes.Conclusion,In pairs such as man-men, child-children, and deer-deer, in which the second item can be said to contain the "plural" morpheme, we cannot state the variation, if any, between the two forms in terms of phonetic environment. Instead we must refer to the morphemes "man", "child" and "deer", or alternatively, to their phonemic shapes (/man/, /cayld/ and /dir/), and specify the allomorph of the "plural" morpheme separately for each. This kind of variation among allomorphs is called morphological conditioning. The morphologically conditioned allomorphs are regarded as irregular in contrast with the phonologically conditioned allomorphs, which are regarded as regular. Men, children and deer are therefore irregular English plurals, just as are alumni, criteria, mice, women, oxen, and strata. The "past tense" morpheme also has its irregular allomorphs, as in drank, brought, swam, was, had, put, took, fled, built and so on; likewise, the past participle morpheme has irregular allomorphs, as in drunk, brought, swum, been, broken, stood, put and so on.