10 some other word- building elements attached to. In short, bound morpheme is not an
independent morpheme and it doesn ’t have meaning if it stands alone.
Here are some examples that describe free morphemes and bound morphemes.
Free Morpheme Bound Morpheme
Nation National
Power Powerful
Hard Hardest
Print Printer
Mean Meaning
Easy Easily
Able Unable
Regular Irregular
Courage Encourage
Perfect
Imperfect
Table 2.1: free morphemes and bound morphemes
2.2.4. Root, Base, and Stem
Looking at words that have some internal structure, it might be possible to decide that the elements that consist of internal structure are not all equal. In
11 “sending”, for instance, it can be seen the structure of “send-ing” and it can be
concluded that the free morpheme “send” has had the bound morpheme “–ing”
attached after it. The key elements to which others are added, is called the root of the word. Katamba 1993:41 states that a root is the irreducible core of a word, with
absolutely nothing else is attached to it. It is the part that always present, possibly with some modification, in the various manifestations of a lexeme. For example,
“walk” is a root and it appears in the set of word-forms that instantiate the lexeme “walk” such as “walk”, “walks”, “walking”, and “walked”.
The additional elements such as “–ly”, “-est”, “-er”, “-ing”, “-im”, “-un”, etc
which are well known as affixes, are not independent. They are added to other elements. It is called a base. All roots are potentially bases. Katamba 1993:45 states
that a base is any unit whatsoever to which affixes of any kind can be added. The affixes attached to a base may be inflectional affixes selected for syntactic reason or
derivational affixes which alter the meaning or grammatical category of the base. For example, an unadorned root like
“boy” can be a base since it has an inflectional affix like
“–s” to form the plural “boys” or derivational affix like “–ish” to turn the noun boy into the adjective
“boyish”. The affixes are not usually formed in a lexical. Some of the affixes are
grammatical. What are added to grammatical affixes is called a stem, whether it is simple or complex in its own structure. Katamba 1993:45 states that a stem is part
of a word that appears before any inflectional affixes i.e. those affixes whose presence is required by the syntax such as markers of singular and plural number in
nouns, tense, verbs, etc. have been added. In “cats”, for instance, the plural
inflectional suffix “–s” is attached to the simple stem “cat”, which is a bare root or
the irreducible core of the word.
12 Coates 1993:29 simply defines the term of root, base, and stem. He states
that root is a morpheme on which the rest of a word is built, base is any structure to which an affix may be added, and stem is any base to which a grammatical affix may
be added. He also states that there are two kinds of affixes, lexical affixes which are formed separated from dictionary word by being attached to bases and grammatical
affixes which add grammatical meanings to the meaning of their stems. Based on that view, it is concluded that all roots are bases. Bases are called stem only in the
context of inflectional morphology.
2.3. Morphemic Analysis
