adjectivestem

Adjectivestem is a term used in linguistics to refer to the base morpheme of an adjective from which other forms are derived or inflected. The adjectivestem carries the core semantic content of the adjective and serves as the anchor to which inflectional or derivational affixes attach.

In morphology, the adjectivestem provides the form to which grammatical endings attach to indicate features such as gender, number, case, or degree in many languages. In some languages, adjectives inflect in predictable ways, and the adjectivestem remains constant across those forms. In other languages, adjectives are derived from other parts of speech, such as nouns or verbs, and the source noun or verb stem may function as the base for the adjectivestem, sometimes undergoing phonological or morphophonemic changes during derivation.

The concept is not always standardized across grammars. Some traditions simply call it the adjective stem or adjectival stem, while others distinguish between a stem used for inflection and a separate derivational base. The idea is particularly useful for description of languages with rich adjective agreement or with systematic derivational processes, as well as in computational work such as lexicon design, morphology rules, and stemming algorithms.

Examples are language-specific and illustrate how the same adjective paradigm can be analyzed differently. In an illustrative language, an adjective meaning “bright” might have a stem bon-, with forms bon-o (masculine singular), bon-a (feminine singular), and bon-os (plural), making bon- the adjectivestem for this paradigm. In practice, analyses are guided by the particular morphology of the language in question.