Which term describes the small set of morpheme-based items that belong to a cooking-related lexical field?

• A. Roots
• B. Derived words
• C. Multi-word units
• D. Lexical field

Answer: (A)

In morphology, the base pieces that carry the core meaning and from which related words are built are roots. In a cooking-related field, the small set of base morphemes like cook-, bake-, fry-, boil- forms a core group because they define the semantic area and serve as the anchors for many related terms. From these roots you can derive other words by adding affixes or combining with other morphemes—cooked, cooking, cooker, baker, baking—yet all keep the cooking idea tied back to those root morphemes. The other options describe different concepts: derived words are the forms built from roots, multi-word units are fixed phrases, and lexical field refers to the overall semantic category, not the base morphemes themselves.