BASE
Thursday, November 8, 2007
BASE = an element (free or bound, root morpheme or complex word) to which additional morphemes are added. Also called a STEM. A base can consist of a single root morpheme, as with the 'kind' of 'kindness'. But a base can also be a word that itself contains more than one morpheme. For example, we can use the word 'kindness' as a base to form the word 'kindnesses'; to make 'kindnesses', we add the plural morpheme, spelled '-es' in this case, to the base 'kindness'.
Labels: Morphology