General linguistic terminology (bound morph(eme))

[Joanne M. Despres]

FWIW, the house policy here is to refer collectively to suffixes,
prefixes, infixes, and pieces of words that can't stand alone (and
that usually are shown in the dictionary with hyphens appended) as
"bound forms."  I can't think of an example of a "root" such as
"gruntle" or "emptive" being called something other than a back-
formation (as Larry suggested).

 Joanne
Joanne M. Despres, Senior Editor
Merriam-Webster, Inc.
jdespres at merriam-webster.com
http://www.merriam-webster.com