Bound roots such as duce, scribe, ceive etc. are usually considered to be relics of Latin or French which in English do not provide lexical information unless they are combined with a prefix (e.g. reduce, describe, perceive). In this morphemebased study it will be argued that these roots and their 'marked' variants duct, script, cept etc., the latter being past participles from an etymological point of view, have retained a life of their own in some respects and thus require individual lexical entries. These entries specify not only orthographic and phonological information, but also morpho-syntactic and skeletal semantic features. The central argument of this study is that the lexical properties identified here for bound roots of Latin origin are synchronically recognizable and thus relevant for all speakers of English, whether they have access to etymological knowledge or not. Evidence for this hypothesis will be drawn from empirical considerations and language-internal phenomena.1 At this point, a brief remark as to the term 'root' is necessary. From a morphological point of view, Marantz' application of this term is quite abstract because it is obviously intended to refer not only to monomorphemic words like grow, but also to complex words like destroy, which are composed of a root and further morphological material. In this paper, the term 'root' is used in the sense of Bauer (1983: 20), i.e. as ''that part of a word-form that remains when all inflectional and derivational affixes have been removed.'' Roots like duce, ceive, scribe etc. will be referred to here as 'bound roots' because they cannot occur independently of other morphemes in sentences. The term 'stem' should be reserved for inflectional morphology. 2 An alternative to subcategorization frames is offered by Plag (2004). Based on the results of an extensive corpus analysis, which revealed that most English affixes are compatible with bases of more than one syntactic category, he argues that the word-class of the input is of subordinate importance in English derivational morphology and that base selection is mainly governed by semantic considerations. Morphology (2006) 16:3-36 5 3 The effectiveness of feature-based linguistic analyses is stressed e