However, in polysynthetic languages with very high levels of inflectional morphology, the term "root" is generally synonymous with "free morpheme".
English has minimal use of morphological strategies such as affixation and features a tendency to have words that are identical to their roots.
Examples of (consonantal roots) which are related but distinct to the concept developed here are formed prototypically by three (as few as two and as many as five) consonants.
For example, in Hebrew, the forms derived from the abstract consonantal roots, a major Hebrew phonetics concept ג-ד-ל (g-d-l) related to ideas of largeness: gadol and gdola (masculine and feminine forms of the adjective "big"), gadal "he grew", higdil "he magnified" and magdelet "magnifier", along with many other words such as godel "size" and migdal "tower".
"[6] According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, "this process is morphologically similar to the production of frequentative (iterative) verbs in Latin, for example: Consider also Rabbinic Hebrew ת-ר-מ √t-r-m 'donate, contribute' (Mishnah: T'rumoth 1:2: 'separate priestly dues'), which derives from Biblical Hebrew תרומה t'rūmå 'contribution', whose root is ר-ו-מ √r-w-m 'raise'; cf.
Decompositional generative frameworks suggest that roots hold little grammatical information and can be considered "category-neutral".
[10] In support of the category-neutral approach, data from English indicates that the same underlying root appears as a noun and a verb - with or without overt morphology.
Thereby, the root is turned into a verb when put into a verbal environment where the head bears the "v" feature (the pattern).
Although all words vary semantically, the general meaning of a greasy, fatty material can be attributed to the root.
[11] Alexiadou and Lohndal (2017) advance the claim that languages have a typological scale when it comes to roots and their meanings and state that Greek lies in between Hebrew and English.