The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes.
Sometimes the term root is also used to describe the word minus its inflectional endings, but with its lexical endings in place. Chatters has the inflectional root or lemma chatter, but the lexical root chat. Inflectional roots are often called stems, and a root in the stricter sense may be thought of as a monomorphemic stem.
The traditional definition allows roots to be either free morphemes or bound morphemes. Root morphemes are essential for affixation and compounds. In polysynthetic languages with very high levels of inflectional morphology, the term root is generally synonymous with free morpheme.
Many such languages have a very restricted number of morphemes that can stand alone as a word Yupik, for instance, has no more than two thousand.
The root of a word is a unit of meaning and, as such, it is an abstraction, though it can usually be represented in writing as a word would be.
It can be said that the root of the English verb form running is run, or the root of the Spanish superlative adjective amplísimo is ampl, since those words are clearly derived from the root forms by simple suffixes that do not alter the roots in any way. English has very little inflection, and hence a tendency to have words that are identical to their roots.
More complicated inflection, as well as other processes, can obscure the root, the root of mice is mouse, and the root of interrupt is, arguably, which is not a word in English and only appears in derivational forms. The root rupt is written as if it were a word, but it is not.
This distinction between the word as a unit of speech and the root as a unit of meaning is even more important in the case of languages where roots have many different forms when used in actual words, as is the case in Semitic languages.
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