Everything about Lexeme totally explained
A
lexeme is an abstract
unit of
morphological analysis in
linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single
word. For example, in the
English language,
run,
runs,
ran and
running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as
RUN. A related concept is the
lemma (or
citation form), which is a particular form of a lexeme that's chosen by convention to represent a canonical form of a lexeme. Lemmas are used in dictionaries as the
headwords, and other forms of a lexeme are often listed later in the entry if they're unusual in some way.
A lexeme belongs to a particular
syntactic category, has a particular
meaning (
semantic value), and in inflecting languages, has a corresponding
inflectional paradigm; that is, a lexeme in many languages will have many different
forms. For example, the lexeme
RUN has a present
third person singular form
runs, a present non-third-person-singular form
run (which also functions as the
past participle and
non-finite form), a past form
ran, and a present
participle running. (It doesn't include
runner, runners, runnable, etc.) The use of the forms of a lexeme is governed by rules of
grammar; in the case of English verbs such as
RUN, these include subject-
verb agreement and compound
tense rules, which determine which form of a verb can be used in a given
sentence.
A
lexicon consists of lexemes.
In many
formal theories of
language, lexemes have
subcategorization frames to account for the number and types of complements they occur with in
sentences and other
syntactic structures.
The notion of a lexeme is very central to
morphology, and thus, many other notions can be defined in terms of it. For example, the difference between
inflection and
derivation can be stated in terms of lexemes:
- Inflectional rules relate a lexeme to its forms.
- Derivational rules relate a lexeme to another lexeme.
Decomposition
Lexemes are often composed of smaller units with individual meaning called
morphemes, according to
root morpheme +
derivational morphemes +
desinence (not necessarily in this order), where:
The root morpheme is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and can't be reduced to smaller constituents.
The derivational morphemes carry only derivational information.
The desinence is composed of all inflectional morphemes, and carries only inflectional information.
The compound root morpheme + derivational morphemes is often called the stem. The decomposition stem + desinence can then be used to study inflection.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Lexeme'.
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