17 Roots, Bases and Affixes

The thing an affix attaches to is called a base. Just like whole words, some bases are morphologically simple, while others are morphologically complex.

For example, consider the word librarian. This word is formed by attaching the affix -ian to the base library.

We can ignore the fact that ‘y’ turns into an ‘i’ when a suffix attaches to library. There’s a convention of English spelling that ‘y’ becomes ‘i’ before an affix; it doesn’t reflect any change in phonological (sound) shape.

Librarian can then itself be the base for another affix: for example, the word librarianship, the state or role of being a librarian, is formed by attaching the affix -ship to the base librarian.

There is a special name for simple bases: root. A root is the smallest possible base, which cannot be divided, what we might think of as the core of a word. Roots in English we’ve seen so far in this chapter include cat, library, and nation.

If you look at the history of the words library and nation, they both trace back to Latin (by way of French), and in Latin the relevant words were morphologically complex: library traces back to the Latin root libr- (meaning “book”), and nation traces back to the Latin root nat- (meaning “be born”). When a child first encounters a word like library or nation, however, the word doesn’t come annotated with this historical information! In the minds of most contemporary English speakers, it is likely that library and nation are treated as simple roots.

Turning back to affixes, an affix is any morpheme that needs to attach to a base. We use the term “affix” when we want to refer to all of these together, but we often specify what type of affix we’re talking about.

A prefix is an affix that attaches before its base, like inter- in international.

A suffix is an affix that follows its base, like -s in cats.

Thus, for example, the word disapproval is made up of one root (approve) preceeded by a prefix (dis-) and a suffix (-al). Or the word relentlessly is made up of one root (relent) and two suffixes (-less) and (-ly).

Prefixes and suffixes are very common, not only in English but also in other languages.

Free and bound morphemes

Another way to divide morphemes is by whether they are free or bound. A free morpheme is one that can occur as a word on its own. For example, cat is a free morpheme. A bound morpheme, by contrast, can only occur in words if it’s accompanied by one or more other morphemes.

Because affixes by definition need to attach to a base, only roots can be free. In English most roots are free, but we do have a few roots that can’t occur on their own. For example, the root -whelmed, which occurs in overwhelmed and underwhelmed, can’t occur on its own as *whelmed.

We show that morphemes are bound by putting hyphens either before or after them, on the side that they attach to other morphemes. This applies to bound roots as well as to affixes.