From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A lexeme is an abstract
unit of
morphological
analysis in
linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of
words
that are different forms of the same word. For example, in the
English language, run, runs, ran and
running are forms of the same lexeme. 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 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
for run has a present
third person
singular form runs, a present
non-third-person-singular form run (which also functions
as the
past participle), a past form ran, and a present
participle running. 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 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.
See also
Look up
lexeme in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
-
Morphology (linguistics)
-
Morpheme
-
Lexicography
-
Lexical word vs. grammatical word
Categories:
Linguistic morphology |
Lexicology
