Languages & Linguistics
Lexeme
A lexeme is the basic unit of meaning in a language, representing a single word or a set of inflected forms with the same meaning. It encompasses all the different forms a word can take, such as its base form, plurals, verb tenses, and so on. Lexemes are essential for understanding the structure and meaning of words within a language.
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10 Key excerpts on "Lexeme"
- Oliver Bonami(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Language Science Press(Publisher)
Part I Lexemes in standard descriptive and theoretical Lexeme-based morphology Chapter 1 Morphology and words: A memoir Mark Aronof Stony Brook University Lexicographers agree with Saussure that the basic units of language are not morphemes but words, or more precisely Lexemes. Here I describe my early journey from the former to the later, driven by a love of words, a belief that every word has its own properties, and a lack of enthusiasm for either phonology or syntax, the only areas available to me as a student. Te greatest infuences on this development were Chomsky’s Remarks on Nominalization , in which it was shown that not all morphologically complex words are compositional, and research on English word-formation that grew out of the European philological tradition, especially the work of Hans Marchand. Te combination leads to a panchronic analysis of word-formation that remains incompatible with modern linguistic theories. Since the end of the nineteenth century, most academic linguistic theories have de-scribed the internal structure of words in terms of the concept of the morpheme , a term frst coined and defned by Baudouin de Courtenay (1895/1972, p. 153): that part of a word which is endowed with psychological autonomy and is for the very same reason not further divisible. It consequently subsumes such concepts as the root (radix), all possible afxes, (sufxes, pre fxes), endings which are expo-nents of syntactic relationships, and the like. Tis is not the traditional view of lexicographers or lexicologists or, surprising to many, Saussure, as Anderson (2015) has reminded us. Since people have writen down lexicons, these lexicons have been lists of words. Te earliest known ordered word list is Egyptian and dates from about 1500 BCE (Haring 2015). In the last half century, linguists have distinguished diferent sorts o f words. Tose that constitute dictionary entries are usually called Lexemes .
eBook - PDF- Alexander Tokar(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
3 Analyzing English Lexemes In this chapter we will be concerned with the formal and semantic structure of English Lexemes. Section 3.1 provides a definition of a Lexeme. Section 3.2 deals with the distribution of English Lexemes as well as their typology from both a formal and a semantic point of view. As regards the distribution of Lexemes, the section will argue that like morphs that realize two different morphemes, lexes that realize two different Lexemes occur in contrastive distribution, while allolexes of the same Lexeme, like allomorphs of the same morpheme, can either be in complementary distribution or in free variation. Section 3.3 introduces the concept of a vocable and discusses all possible semantic relations that can hold between two or more Lexemes which form the same vocable. Finally, Section 3.4 briefly touches on the concept of a Lexeme family. 3.1 What is a Lexeme? A Lexeme can be defined as a conventionalized association between any free form and some particular lexical meaning. For example, the conventionalized association between the signifier cat and the lexical meaning 'cat' forms the Lexeme CAT; the conventionalized association between the signifier untrue and the lexical meaning 'not faithful' forms the Lexeme UNTRUE; the conventionalized association between the signifier waithood and the lexical meaning 'a particular waiting stage in the life of a college graduate' forms the Lexeme WAITHOOD; etc. Consider also the idiomatic VP kicked the bucket of (57) and the idiomatic clause (58). (57) There's the guy who kicked the bucket after a shot (COCA) (58) A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush (COCA) The VP kicked the bucket is a fully-idiomatic phrase whose meaning contains only the grammatical past tense meaning of the inflectional affix -ed but not the literal lexical meanings of the components kick, the, and bucket: kicked the bucket does not mean 'kicked some particular bucket' but 'died'.
eBook - PDFLanguage Learning and the Brain
Lexical Processing in Second Language Acquisition
- Ulf Schütze(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
We can use Nation’s model and link it to phonemes (spoken form), Lexemes (written form), and lemmas (concept/the question of what other words the word is associated with). Matching phonemes to Lexemes represents the form- to-meaning relationship. Morphemes would be linked to the question of what A New Word 8 parts of a word are needed in order to recognize or produce a word, as well as to grammatical patterns. As was explained earlier, these are identified/attached after the phonemes and Lexemes have been processed, even though morphemes can feed information back to that process. The form-to-meaning relationship can be complex. By drawing on Nation’s multilevel model, Schmitt (2010a) points out that we need to be exposed to a word several times in order to fully understand a word’s form-to-meaning relationship. In terms of processing, we distinguish between phonemes, Lexemes, mor- phemes, and graphemes. A phoneme is best described as a speech unit express- ing a distinct sound; that is, a sound that is different when compared to another sound. Encountering a new word, a number of phonemes need to be identified. They are grouped as syllables. The correct order of phonemes, as well as the syllables, needs to be established. This is done via nodes that keep information on what is called serial order. We will go into more detail regarding nodes and serial order in Chapter 4, “Cognitive Load.” A Lexeme is an abstract unit that describes the form-to-meaning relationship of a single word. A Lexeme needs to be identified, in particular, the concept of a Lexeme that is expressed through a lemma. A lemma is part of a Lexeme. In addition to the lemma, a Lexeme includes possible morphological markers that indicate if and what type of morpheme can be attached. A concept, the idea behind a word, can sometimes be difficult to define.
eBook - PDFProductivity and Creativity
Studies in General and Descriptive Linguistics in Honor of E. M. Uhlenbeck
- Mark Janse(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
morphemes when considered as to their formal aspect. And these linguistic forms are primarily char-acterized by their arrangement, i.e. the various features (or habits) of grammatical form. 258 Pierre Swiggers Notes 1. In Bolinger (1963) the word is taken to be a basic unit, which is unique in form and unique in meaning. For the word defined as a unit of integration, see Swiggers (1987). 2. The view is incisively formulated in Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias, 16a: Now spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks sym-bols of spoken sounds. Just as the written marks are not the same for all men, neither are the spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of— viz. affections of the soul—are for all the same; and what these affections are likenesses of—viz. real things—are also the same ... Just as some thoughts in the soul are neither true nor false while some are necessarily one or the other, so also with spoken sounds. For falsity and truth have to do with combination and separation. So, names and verbs on themselves—like man or white when nothing more is added—are like the thoughts that are without com-bination and separation; for so far they are neither true nor false. 3. According to Bolinger (1963: 136), the meaning of a sentence must be discussed in terms of the meanings of the component words and traffic-rule morphemes. 4. I will not be concerned here with generative (and post-generative) proposals. 5. Nor is it used in Sapir (1921). In French linguistics the term morpheme was introduced, as a concept in the theory of grammar, by Vendryes (1921, written in 1914). In Vendryes (1921) the morpheme is opposed to the semanteme, a distinction which has its roots in the traditional (lexically slanted) distinction between function-words (or relational words) vs. content-words. See also the discussion of grammatical concepts in Sapir (1921: Chapter IV).
eBook - PDF- Ladislav Zgusta, Vera Cerny(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Our further discussion will show that this is only a very rough model, in any respect. Notwithstanding its sketchiness, we assume that the reader will understand the notion of lexical meaning, at least intuitively; we hope, however, to refine the notion in the following paragraphs. We shall see, for example, that it is not only single words which carry lexical meaning and are constituent elements of sentences, but also much more complex units (see § 3.3.4), so that we should rather speak about lexical units in order to cover both the simple and the more complex ones. It is only for the sake of simplification that we speak about words; as already stated, what has been said is meant only as a starting point for the discussion, to give the first general idea. And this is also the reason why we begin our whole discussion with the concept of lexical meaning, and not with the form of the words (lexical units); we shall see (§ 3.3.4) that their form is rather irrelevant: they are constitute more by the lexical meaning they carry than by anything else. 3 SEMANTICS 1.1 The science, or the branch of linguistics, which studies lexical meaning is usually called semantics, or, less frequently in English, semasiology. Let us say at once that it is one of the most difficult fields. There are many diffi-culties in this sphere of research, only some of which we shall mention. There is no agreement among linguists, or at least no impressively strong concord of opinion, about the very nature of lexical meaning. Some are in-clined to interpret it in more or less psychological terms, assuming that there are mental processes involved in the situation.
eBook - PDFLinguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing
100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax
- Emily M. Bender(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Springer(Publisher)
CHAPTER 2 Morphology: Introduction #7 Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language, usually consisting of a sequence of phones paired with concrete meaning. Morphology is the subfield oflinguistics concerned with the formation and internal structure of words. It encompasses morphotactics, or questions of which morphemes are allowed to combine within a word and in what order; morphophonology, how the form of morphemes is conditioned by other morphemes they combine with; and morphosyntax, how the morphemes in a word affect its combinatoric potential. 1 In all three cases, the units under consideration are morphemes, which can be defined as the smallest meaningful units oflanguage. A morpheme is typically a sequence of phones (sounds) paired with a concrete meaning. 2 A simple example is given in (6) where the boundaries between morphemes (with words) are indicated by'+': (6) Morpheme+s are the small+est mean+ing+ful unit+s oflanguage. This example, however, belies the actual complexity of morphological systems. As described be- low, both the 'form' and the 'meaning' part of the pairing can vary from the prototypes in impor- tant ways. Specifically, the form can be made up of phones which are not contiguous (#8), it can be made up of something other than phones (#9), it can in fact be null (#10), and finally the form can vary with the linguistic context (#23-#26). On the meaning side, in addition to core lexical meaning (#11), morphemes can convey changes to that meaning (#12) (which furthermore can be idiosyncratic (#13)) and/or syntactically or semantically relevant features (#14, #28-#43) #8 The phones making up a morpheme don't have to be contiguous. While prototypical morphemes are sequences of phones (sounds, represented by letters in alphabetic writing systems) which furthermore have easily identified boundaries between them, there are several ways in which morphemes can depart from this prototypical case.
eBook - PDF- Dieter Wunderlich(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The study of a language’s lexicon is lexicology . A network of semantically related lexical items, such as the words for colour or fruit, is a lexical field (or semantic field ). In generative grammar, the lexicon is the component containing all the information about the structural properties of lexical items. Lexical syntax is an approach which incorpo-rates syntactic rules within the lexicon; lexical phonology is an approach where some of the phonological rules are transferred to the lexicon. In psy-cholinguistics, the stored mental representation of what people know about their language is called the mental lexicon , and the study of the psychology of word meanings is sometimes called psycholexicology . (Crystal 1992: 227–228) ———–———————————————————————————— 3 Most of the German dictionaries we checked restrict their definitions and expli-cations to the ‘dictionary’-reading. This is e.g. true of Klappenbach & Steinitz (1977: 3.2361) and Pfeifer et al. (1989: 1011). The distinction under discussion is made in Duden (1994: 819f.). Concepts of the lexicon in theoretical linguistics 29 This definition is basically in agreement with the definition by Bußmann (1996): Lexicon [Late Grk lexicón (sc. biblión) ‘book of or for words’]. 1 An alpha-betically or semantically ordered list of words for a language, dialect , or sociolect , or a list of terminology for a specific discipline. Such lists are generally compiled as reference works ( also lexicography , vocabulary ). 2 In its most general sense the level of description which codifies the mor-phol. and semant. aspects (i.e. the forms and meanings) of the vocabulary of a lang. which cannot be derived from the regularities of the ling. system. 3 In transformational grammar , one of the basic components of grammar in the form of a subordinated list of all lexical formatives . The lex. entry consists of a phonetic-phonolog. descr.
- Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams, , Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
The word is derived from the Greek word morphe, meaning “form.” If Goldwyn had taken a linguistics course, he would have said, more correctly, “In two morphemes: im-possible.” The study of the internal structure of words, and of the rules by which words are formed, is morphology. This word itself consists of two morphemes, morph 1 ology. The morpheme -ology means “branch of knowledge,” so the meaning of morphology is “the branch of knowledge concerning (word) forms.” Morphol- ogy also refers to our internal grammatical knowledge concerning the words of our language, and like most linguistic knowledge we are not consciously aware of it. A single word may be composed of one or more morphemes: One morpheme boy desire meditate two morphemes boy 1 ish desire 1 able meditate 1 tion three morphemes boy 1 ish 1 ness desire 1 able 1 ity four morphemes gentle 1 man 1 li 1 ness un 1 desire 1 able 1 ity more than four un 1 gentle 1 man 1 li 1 ness anti 1 dis 1 establish 1 ment 1 ari 1 an 1 ism Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 38 CHAPTER 2 Morphology: The Words of Language A morpheme may be represented by a single letter such as the morpheme a- meaning “without” as in amoral and asexual, or by a single syllable, such as child and ish in child 1 ish. A morpheme may also consist of more than one syllable: of two syllables, as in camel, lady, and water; of three syllables, as in Hackensack and crocodile; or of four or more syllables, as in hallucinate, apoth- ecary, helicopter, and accelerate.
eBook - PDFAn Advanced Introduction to Semantics
A Meaning-Text Approach
- Igor Mel'čuk, Jasmina Milićević(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Definition 4.10: Lexical Unit A lexical unit of language L is either a Lexeme or an idiom. NB: We leave aside the nominemes, which, as we said, are primarily units of an encyclopedia, and therefore of little interest for lexicology. For a formal description of a lexical unit [LU ] in an ECD, see Ch. 8, 2.2. Compositional phrasemes – collocations and clichés – are not LUs of the language and do not have dictionary articles of their own. A collocation is described in the article of its base, as part of the restricted lexical cooccurrence of the base. A cliché (including a pragmateme) is described in the article of its lexical anchor: an LU that either is part of this cliché or identifies the corresponding situation. For instance, the cliché What time is it? has as anchor the Lexeme TIME (N) 1 2; for the pragmateme Hold the line, please [in telephone conversation] the anchors are TELEPHONE (N) and (telephone) CALL (N) . Along the same lines, the pragmateme Emphasis added, used when someone writing a text quotes another person and wants to indicate that he has somehow emphasized a fragment of the quotation, has three anchors – TEXT, QUOTATION and EMPHASIZE – and appears in the three dictionary articles. 6 On formal description of collocations and clichés in an ECD – by means of lexical functions – see Ch. 7, 2 & 3. Table 4.2 sums up the lexicographic status these four types of lexical items are given in the ECD.
- N. G. Komlev(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
3 ASPECTS OF THE WORD 3.1. GENERAL PROPOSITIONS 3.1.1. What is the Word? When we speak of the meaning of meaning, we have in mind the lexical meaning, the meaning of the WORD. A description of the semantic components of the word should be preceded by a defini-tion of the word as a unit of language. Most attempts to provide such a definition suffer from one-sidedness. 1 There are well-known phonetic, semantic, morphologi-cal, and syntactic definitions, and combinations thereof. 2 The units of language can be more or less clearly outlined as a result of investigating and surveying the whole system of pre-viously defined units. By a unit, L. S. Vygotskij emphasized, 1 In this connection see: O. S. Axmanova, Eäce raz k voprosu ο slove kak osnovnoj edinice jazyka [Once Again the Question of the Word As the Basic Unit of Language]; R. A. Budagov, K kritike reljativistskix teorij slova [Toward a Criticism of Relativist Theories of the Word]; P. S. Popov, Esce raz k voprosu ο slove [Once Again the Question of the Word]; A. I. Smirnickij, K voprosu ο slove [Toward the Question of the Word]; A. A. Ufimceva, K voprosu ob izucenii slova [Toward the Question of the Study of the Word]; N. Girdansky, The Adventure of Language; J. Goldberg, The Wonder of Words; H. Day, Thirty Days to a Super-power Vocabulary; K. Knauer, Grenzen der Wissenschaft vom Wort; T. Segerstedt, Die Macht des Wortes. 2 See: I. E. Anickov (1963), Β. N. Golovin (1961), P. S. Kuznecov (1964), Μ. V. Panov (1956,1961), V. Z. Panfilov (1963), Ju. S. Stepanov (1966), Ν. A. Janko-Trinickaja (1959), S. A. Jaxontov (1963), F. Hiorth (1958), C. F. Hockett (1959), W. Jassem (1960), S. Jodlowski (1960), W. Manczak (1952), N. Morciniec (1960), N. Porzig (1959), M. Rudnicki (1955), K. Togeby (1949). ASPECTS OF THE WORD 67 we mean a product of analysis which ... possesses all the funda-mental properties inherent in the whole, which properties are then the indivisible living parts of this whole.
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