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In English grammar and morphology, a stem is the form of a word before any inflectional affixes are
added. In English, most stems also qualify as words.

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The term base is commonly used by linguists to refer to any stem (or root) to which an affix is
attached.

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"A stem may consist of a single root, of two roots forming a compound stem, or of a root (or stem) and
one or more derivational affixes forming a derived stem."
(R. M. W. Dixon, The Languages of Australia. Cambridge University Press, 2010)

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"The three main morphological processes are compounding, affixation, and conversion. Compounding
involves adding two stems together, as in the above window-sill — or blackbird, daydream, and so on.
... For the most part, affixes attach to free stems, i.e., stems that can stand alone as a word. Examples
are to be found, however, where an affix is added to a bound stem — compare perishable, where perish
is free, with durable, where dur is bound, or unkind, where kind is free, with unbeknown, where
beknown is bound."
(Rodney D. Huddleston, English Grammar: An Outline. Cambridge University Press, 1988)

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"Conversion is where a stem is derived without any change in form from one belonging to a different
class. For example, the verb bottle (I must bottle some plums) is derived by conversion from the noun
bottle, while the noun catch (That was a fine catch) is converted from the verb."
(Rodney D. Huddleston, English Grammar: An Outline. Cambridge University Press, 1988)

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"Base is the core of a word, that part of the word which is essential for looking up its meaning in the
dictionary; stem is either the base by itself or the base plus another morpheme to which other
morphemes can be added. [For example,] vary is both a base and a stem; when an affix is attached the
base/stem is called a stem only. Other affixes can now be attached."
(Bernard O'Dwyer, Modern English Structures: Form, Function, and Position. Broadview, 2000)

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"The terms root and stem are sometimes used interchangeably. However, there is a subtle difference
between them: a root is a morpheme that expresses the basic meaning of a word and cannot be further
divided into smaller morphemes. Yet a root does not necessarily constitute a fully understandable
word in and of itself. Another morpheme may be required. For example, the form struct in English is a
root because it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts, yet neither can it be used in discourse
without a prefix or a suffix being added to it (construct, structural, destruction, etc.) "

"A stem may consist of just a root. However, it may also be analyzed into a root plus derivational
morphemes ... Like a root, a stem may or may not be a fully understandable word. For example, in
English, the forms reduce and deduce are stems because they act like any other regular verb--they can
take the past-tense suffix. However, they are not roots, because they can be analyzed into two parts, -
duce, plus a derivational prefix re- or de-."

"So some roots are stems, and some stems are roots. ., but roots and stems are not the same thing.
There are roots that are not stems (-duce), and there are stems that are not roots (reduce). In fact, this
rather subtle distinction is not extremely important conceptually, and some theories do away with it
entirely."
(Thomas Payne, Exploring Language Structure: A Student's Guide. Cambridge University Press,
2006)

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"Once there was a song about a purple-people-eater, but it would be ungrammatical to sing about a
purple-babies-eater. Since the licit irregular plurals and the illicit regular plurals have similar
meanings, it must be the grammar of irregularity that makes the difference."

"The theory of word structure explains the effect easily. Irregular plurals, because they are quirky, have
to be stored in the mental dictionary as roots or stems; they cannot be generated by a rule. Because of
this storage, they can be fed into the compounding rule that joins an existing stem to another existing
stem to yield a new stem. But regular plurals are not stems stored in the mental dictionary; they are
complex words that are assembled on the fly by inflectional rules whenever they are needed. They are
put together too late in the root-to-stem-to-word assembly process to be available to the compounding
rule, whose inputs can only come out of the dictionary."
(Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. William Morrow, 1994)

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