The stem
Some examples of Kujamaat Jóola roots are given below:
Inflectional affixes may attach to a root, or the root can be extended by the addition of derivational affixes. The root plus derivational affixes is called a stem. You have already encountered one verbal derivation suffix, -u ‘from’. Five more are listed below, with examples:
We see in (4c) that the root buj ‘kill’ can be suffixed with the strong reflexive to form bujɔrɔ ‘kill one’s self’. If a speaker were to add the reflexive-descriptive suffix (4b) instead, the result is a verb with more idiosyncratic semantics, bujɔ ‘be wounded’. The difference between affixation of the reflexive and strong reflexive is not always so striking, however, as we see in (5):
The sometimes idiosyncratic meaning of verbs bearing the reflexive suffix reflects a major point, that the meanings of morphologically complex words are not always fully predictable from those of their parts. Through use in context, morphologically complex words may acquire lexicalized meanings and need to be listed in the lexicon. This must be true of bujɔ ‘be wounded’.
Evidence that both roots and the roots plus derivational affixes count as stems in Kujamaat Jóola verb morphology comes from the following observations:
The stem in Bantu languages (also in the Niger-Congo family) may also consist of a root plus derivational suffixes (Hyman 1993; Mchombo 1993). For example, Mchombo shows that the Chichewa verb stem plus derivational affixes functions as a unit in that it may be nominalized (but units larger than the verb stem may not), undergo reduplication, and be used as the bare imperative. Chichewa is similar to Kujamaat Jóola in these respects. In addition, the Chichewa verb stem serves as the domain for a phonological process, tense–lax vowel harmony.
