文档介绍：What is a Root Word?
A root word is the most basic form of a word that is able to convey a particular description, thought or meaning. If that definition is good enough for you, you should skip to the useful stuff. Below, as it always seems to be whenever we discuss linguistics, things get decidedly more technical.
Sometimes the term "root" is used to describe the word minus its inflectional endings, but with its lexical endings in place. Inflection is the change or marking of a word to reflect grammar, such as gender, tense, number or person. A word independent of different inflections is called a lexeme, while the form of a word that is considered to have no or minimal inflection is called a lemma. For example, the word "maddening" has the inflectional root or lemma "madden," but the lexical root "mad." Inflectional roots are often referred to as stems, and a root in the stricter sense may be thought of as a monomorphemic stem, or a stem with only one morpheme.
Free and Bound Morphemes
Roots can be either "free morphemes" or "bound morphemes." Root morphemes are essential for adding prefixes and suffixes and for pound words. Free morphemes, or unbound morphemes, can stand alone, such as the morpheme "near" in the word "nearly." Bound morphemes, on the other hand, occur only as parts of words, such as the morpheme "-ly" in the word "nearly."
The Effect of Inflection
The root of a word is a unit of meaning (the morpheme) and, as such, it is an abstraction, though it can usually be represented in writing as a word would be. As an example, the root of the verb "running" is "run," and the root of the adjective "amplified" is "ampli-," since those words are clearly derived from the root forms by simple suffixes that do not significantly alter the roots. The English language has very little inflection, and hence a tendency to have words that are very close to their respective roots. (This distinction between the word as a unit of speech and the root as a unit of me