ABSTRACT
Stems are bases to which affixes with grammatical meanings-grammatical affixes-are attached. But bases themselves may show internal structure. The most obvious cases are those in which the base consists of two bases, both roots of which are free morphemes, in a head-dependency relation:
Where the present-day English written form includes a hyphen we may also identify the items as being structured in the same sorts of ways as the set above:
(Not everyone will agree on whether or not to hyphenate some particular expression. That’s not important here-it’s a matter of spelling, not morphology.)
You might also say that some bases consisting of two elements where no hyphen is written are also structured in the same way, because of a special feature of their pronunciation: they are pronounced with their main stress on the first element, just like words of the HOUSEPLANT type, and they function just like them in sentences too.
