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Linguistics & Grammar vocabulary · Morphology and Word Formation

Stem

Meaning in linguistics & grammar, with examples

/stem/nounCommon term

In linguistics & grammar, stem means: The part of a word to which inflectional endings are added; it can be a bare root (walk) or a root with derivational affixes (teacher in teachers).

In Turkish: gövde

How it is used

Used in morphology and language teaching, especially for agglutinative languages like Turkish, where long words are built on a stem. In computing, stemming means cutting words down to their stem for searching.

Example sentences

  1. In 'kitaplıklar', 'kitaplık' is the stem and 'kitap' is the root.

  2. Add the plural -s to the stem 'teacher' to get 'teachers'.

Common collocations

  • verb stem
  • noun stem
  • stem and root
  • stem change
  • rootThe core part of a word that carries its basic meaning and cannot be broken into smaller meaningful parts, such as 'form' in reformation or 'kitap' in kitaplık.
  • inflectionA change in the form of a word, usually by adding an ending, to show grammatical information such as tense, number, person or case, without making a new word.
  • suffixA letter or group of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning, its word class or its grammatical form, such as -ness, -ful or -ed.
  • morphemeThe smallest part of a word that has its own meaning or grammatical job, such as un-, happy and -ness in unhappiness.

More terms: Morphology and Word Formation

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