English Language Roots 英语词根【DOC精选】.docxVIP

English Language Roots Root Words ? Morphemes, Inflections Similarity ? So, What is a Root Word? A root word is the most basic form of a word that is able to convey a particular description, thought or meaning. If that definition is good enough for you, you should skip to the useful stuff. Below, as it always seems to be whenever we discuss linguistics, things get decidedly more technical. ? What are Morphemes? In linguistics, [okay, last warning] English language roots are officially known as morphemes and defined as the primary lexical unit of a word. They carry significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into any smaller constituents parts. Almost all regular English words contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes. Sometimes the term root is used to describe the word minus its inflectional endings, but with its lexical endings in place. Inflection is the change or marking of a word to reflect grammar, such as gender, tense, number or person. A word independent of different inflections is called a lexeme, while the form of a word that is considered to have no or minimal inflection is called a lemma. For example, the word maddening has the inflectional root or lemma madden, but the lexical root mad. Inflectional roots are often referred to as stems, and a root in the stricter sense may be thought of as a monomorphemic stem, or a stem with only one morpheme. ? Free and Bound Morphemes Roots can be either free morphemes or bound morphemes. Root morphemes are essential for adding prefixes and suffixes and for constructing compound words. Free morphemes, or unbound morphemes, can stand alone, such as the morpheme near in the word nearly. Bound morphemes, on the other hand, occur only as parts of words, such as the morpheme -ly in the word nearly. ? The Effect of Inflection The root of a word is a unit of meaning (the morpheme) and, as such, it is an abstraction, though it can usually be represented in writing as a word would be. As an example,