Morphological stems: what William of Ockham really said

Abstract

Two concepts that have figured widely in morphological analysis and theory for centuries are root and stem (or theme). The OED defines root in its linguistic sense as ‘an ultimate unanalysable element of language’ and gives a first citation from John Palsgrave’s grammar of French printed in 1530, said to be the first French grammar printed in any language. In that same citation, Palsgrave also uses the term theme in much the same sense that I will use stem here. The OED definition of this sense of theme is ‘The inflexional base or stem of a word, consisting of the “root” with modification or addition’. According to the OED, stem does not appear in its linguistic sense, which is given there as ‘the theme of a word (or of a particular group of its cases or tenses), to which the flexional suffixes are attached’, until 1851. A root is thus defined in terms of analyzability (it is unanalyzable morphologically), while a stem or theme is defined in terms of the inflectional elements that attach to it. I will make the same distinction in this work. In recent work, David Embick and Morris Halle (Embick & Halle 2005), have questioned whether we need both concepts, root and stem, in linguistics: