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In linguistics, a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. Typically, a stem remains unmodified during inflection with few exceptions due to apophony (for example in Polish, miast-o ("city") and w mieść-e ("in the city"); in English, sing, sang, and sung, where it can be modified according to morphological rules or peculiarities, such as sandhi)
A long sentence completion test is the Forer Sentence Completion Test, which has 100 stems. The tests are usually administered in booklet form where respondents complete the stems by writing words on paper. The structures of sentence completion tests vary according to the length and relative generality and wording of the sentence stems.
A stemmer for English operating on the stem cat should identify such strings as cats, catlike, and catty. A stemming algorithm might also reduce the words fishing, fished, and fisher to the stem fish. The stem need not be a word, for example the Porter algorithm reduces argue, argued, argues, arguing, and argus to the stem argu.
Lexical items composed of more than one word are also sometimes called lexical chunks, gambits, lexical phrases, lexicalized stems, or speech formulae. [citation needed] The term polyword listemes is also sometimes used. [citation needed]
Inflectional roots are often called stems. A root, or a root morpheme, 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 the building blocks for affixation and compounds.
The stems take the form of incomplete sentences; for example, one item states simply "When people are helpless" with instructions prompting the test-taker to complete the rest. The clinician or researcher should be present in the room with the test-taker to prevent the subject from asking others how they should answer the question.
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: lexeme and word-form [definition needed]. Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals. [8] For instance, the lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate.