Where does stem collide?

The part of a word to which inflectional affixes attach: the base form that remains once endings such as a plural or a tense marker are set aside, and that may itself already contain derivational material. Bauer's 2003 Introducing linguistic morphology set out how a stem is distinguished from a bare root and from a fully formed word, and how affixes build onto it. The referent is an abstract unit of word structure, identified by analysis rather than measured, and it has nothing in common with a plant's axis, a self-renewing cell, or a mark on a musical staff beyond the four letters.[1]

Unit

The base of a word that inflectional affixes attach to

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by segmenting words and comparing their forms across a paradigm to see which part stays constant under inflection

An undifferentiated cell that can both renew itself through division and give rise to more specialised cell types: a cell defined not by a fixed identity but by its capacity to self-renew and to differentiate. Thomson and colleagues' 1998 report of embryonic stem cell lines derived from human blastocysts described cells that proliferated in culture while keeping the potential to form derivatives of all three embryonic germ layers. The referent is a living cell characterised by its behaviour in culture, and it is not a plant's stem, a word's base, or the stem of a note.[2]

Unit

A cell defined by self-renewal and the potential to differentiate

Recovery means

Self-renewal itself is the defining property: the cell replaces itself while producing differentiated descendants

Measured by

Established by culturing the cells over many divisions and testing whether they retain markers of the undifferentiated state and can give rise to specialised lineages