Resumen de The main units of Spanish morphology: Roots, affixes, stems, words
This chapter presents the basic units used in the morphological analysis of Spanish. The units of a scientific discipline are the instruments that are used to delimit, characterise and analyse the object of study of that discipline. Morphology deals with the internal analysis of words, which can be considered the major unit of morphological analysis. A special kind of root can be identified in Spanish morphology, namely classical roots. Among the different phenomena usually mentioned, those that concern Spanish are mainly coordination structures, phrasal scope of some prefixes, pronominalization and modification of part of compounds. In Distributed Morphology, acategorial roots, which are segmentable units, are listed in the lexicon, and they constitute the beginning of the morphological derivation of a complex word. The chapter focuses on the morpheme concept, on the stem as a unit of lexical storage and, finally, on the word as a syntactic atom.
