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Running Are Forms of The Same Lexeme, Conventionally Written As RUN. A Related Concept Is The

A lexeme is an abstract linguistic unit that corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word, such as "run", "runs", "ran", and "running". A lexeme belongs to a syntactic category, has a semantic value, and has an inflectional paradigm that determines its forms based on rules of grammar. A lexicon consists of lexemes. Lexemes can be further decomposed into smaller meaning-bearing units called morphemes, such as a root morpheme carrying semantic content and derivational or inflectional morphemes carrying grammatical information.

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43 views

Running Are Forms of The Same Lexeme, Conventionally Written As RUN. A Related Concept Is The

A lexeme is an abstract linguistic unit that corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word, such as "run", "runs", "ran", and "running". A lexeme belongs to a syntactic category, has a semantic value, and has an inflectional paradigm that determines its forms based on rules of grammar. A lexicon consists of lexemes. Lexemes can be further decomposed into smaller meaning-bearing units called morphemes, such as a root morpheme carrying semantic content and derivational or inflectional morphemes carrying grammatical information.

Uploaded by

Charone Vasco Guente Chilongo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lexeme

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 is 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 are not common conjugations of
that word.

A lexeme belongs to a particular syntactic category, has a certain 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
does not include runner, runners, 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 sub-categorization frames to account for the
number and types of complements they occur within 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

With languages whose orthography employs an alphabet, its 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 cannot 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.[5] The
decomposition stem + desinence can then be used to study inflection

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