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lexical or functional meaning of their own. Therefore, the
morphemes making up words of conditional segmentability differ
from morphemes making up words of complete segmentability in
that the former do not reach the full status of morphemes for the
semantic reason and that is why a special term is applied to them –
pseudomorphemes or quasi-morphemes.
Defective morphemic segmentability is the property of
words whose unique morphemic components seldom or never
recur in other words (e.g. in the words cranberry, gooseberry,
strawberry defective morphemic segmentability is obvious due to
the fact that the morphemes cran-, goose-, straw- are unique
morphemes).
Morphemes can be classified into.
1. From semantic point of view: roots and affixes/non-
roots. A root is the lexical nucleus of a word bearing the major
individual meaning common to a set of semantically related words,
constituting one word cluster/word-family (e.g. learn-learner-
learned learnable; heart-hearten, dishearten, hear-broken, hearty,
kind-hearted etc.) with which no grammatical properties of the
word are connected. In this respect, the peculiarity of English as a
unique language is explained by its analytical language structure –
morphemes are often homonymous with independent units
(words). A morpheme that is homonymous with a word is called a
root morpheme.
Here we have to mention the difference between a root and a
stem. A root is the ultimate constituent which remains after the
removal of all functional and derivational affixes and does not
admit any further analysis. Unlike a root, a stem is that part of the
word that remains unchanged throughout its paradigm (formal
aspect). For instance, heart-hearts-to one’s heart’s content vs.
hearty-heartier-the heartiest. It is the basic unit at the derivational
level, taking the inflections which shape the word grammatically
as a part of speech. There are three types of stems: simple, derived
and compound.

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