Morphological structure of 'misrepresent' and 'consideration'

Question

I've been wondering about the morphological structure of 'misrepresent' and 'consideration.'

In 'misrepresent,' is sent, present, or represent the stem? It's quite tricky!

Consideration is also a little confusing – when analyzing its morphological structure, should it be broken down into Consider + -ate + -ion, or should it be consider + -ion?

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[EDIT] I checked Webster and dictionary.com, and from what I have found, "represent" comes from the Latin 'representer.' When we analyze the structure of 'misrepresenting' does that mean the stem is 'represent' and not 'present'? 'Consideration' comes from the Latin, Considerare (Google define function), while 'considerate' (v) is considered archaic. Should 'consideration' be broken down into consider + ation then? I apologize if my questions are somewhat elementary - I'm new to language study and I'm still trying to grasp the basics of it.

Answer 1

Well, both words are borrowed from Latin, so you'll have to decide yourself how tightly the morphemes are fused.

For instance, consider, which is clearly con + Root,
does not have a very good candidate for what Root might be.
Though the OED does say that this is the same root as in
desire, which is clearly de + Root.

As for the -ation, that's two different, mostly fused, suffixes,
the -at(e) participial inflectional suffix in Latin
and the -ion(is) nominalization derivational suffix in Latin.

The first one makes a verb form out of a root
and the second makes an adjective (like a participle) into a noun.
This was all done in Latin before the whole word was borrowed into English.
So many Latin words with this suffix pair were borrowed that they are common
in modern English. Whether you want to call this English morphology or not is up to you.

As for represent, that, too was all formed in Latin before it was borrowed.
The -sent root part turns out to be the present participle stem of esse 'to be'.
Maybe you can pry at the junctures to see how tightly the morphemes are frozen,
but in fact English derivational morphology is more like archeology than anything else.

The mis- part in misrepresent was definitely added later, though, because it's Germanic.
So that's the top archeological stratum.