Lexeme

Information about Lexeme

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, conventionally written as RUN.^[1] 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 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, 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.

Composition

Lexemes are often decomposed into smaller units 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 into smaller constituents.^[2]
The derivational morphemes carry only derivational information.^[3]
The desinence is composed of all inflectional morphemes, and carries only inflectional information.^[4]

The compound root morpheme + derivational morphemes is often called the stem.^[5] The decomposition stem + desinence can then be used to study inflection.

Notes

1. ^ RUN is here intended to display in small caps. Software limitations may result in its display either in full-sized capitals (RUN) or in full-sized capitals of a smaller font; either is anyway regarded as an acceptable substitute for genuine small caps.
2. ^ SIL dictionary of linguistic terms: What is a root?
3. ^ SIL dictionary of linguistic terms: What is a derivational affix?
4. ^ SIL dictionary of linguistic terms: What is an inflectional affix?
5. ^ SIL dictionary of linguistic terms: What is a stem?

units of measurement have played a crucial role in human endeavour from early ages up to this day. Disparate systems of measurement used to be very common. Now there is a global standard, the International System (SI) of units, the modern form of the metric system.
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For other uses, see Morphology.

Morphology is the field within linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. (Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.
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In linguistics, semantic analysis is the process of relating syntactic structures, from the levels of phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs to the level of the writing as a whole, to their language-independent meanings, removing features specific to particular linguistic and
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For the journal, see .

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist.
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A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetical value. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes.
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English}}}
Writing system: Latin (English variant)
Official status
Official language of: 53 countries
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: en
ISO 639-2: eng
ISO 639-3: eng
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lemma is the canonical form of a lexeme.

Specifically, in lexicography, "lemma" is a synonym for headword, q.v.

In morphology, a lemma is the canonical form of a lexeme.
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A headword, head word, lemma, or sometimes catchword is the word under which a set of related dictionary or encyclopaedia entries appears. The headword is used to locate the entry, and dictates its alphabetical position.
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In computer science, SYNTAX is a system used to generate lexical and syntactic analyzers (parsers) (both deterministic and non-deterministic) for all kind of context-free grammars
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In linguistics, meaning is the content carried by the words or signs exchanged by people when communicating through language. Restated, the communication of meaning is the purpose and function of language.
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inflection or inflexion is the modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) to reflect grammatical (that is, relational) information, such as gender, tense, number or person.
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Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to the participant role of a referent, such as the speaker, the addressee, and others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns.
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grammatical number is grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" or "more than one").^[1]
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In linguistics, a participle is a non-finite verb form that can be used in compound tenses or voices, or as a modifier. Participles often share properties with other parts of speech, in particular adjectives and nouns.
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In linguistics, a non-finite verb (or a verbal) is a verb form that is not limited by a subject; and more generally, it is not fully inflected by categories that are marked inflectionally in language, such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender, and person.
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Grammar is the study of the rules governing the use of a given natural language, and as such a field of linguistics. Traditionally, grammar included morphology and syntax, in modern linguistics commonly expanded by the subfields of phonetics, phonology, orthography, semantics, and
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verb is a word belonging to the part of speech that usually denotes an action (bring, read), an occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand).
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In linguistics, a sentence is a unit of language, characterized in most languages by the presence of a finite verb. For example, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
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lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes.

The lexicon includes the lexemes used to actualize words. Lexemes are formed according to morpho-syntactic rules and express sememes.
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Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. Part of this endeavor involves the search for and explanation of linguistic universals, that is, properties all languages have in common.
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See Language (journal) for the linguistics journal.

A language is a system of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon.
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In syntactic linguistic theory, the subcategorization frame of a word is the number and types of syntactic arguments that it co-occurs with (i. e. the number and kinds of other words that it selects when appearing in a sentence).
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For other uses, see Morphology.

In linguistics, derivation is the process of creating new lexemes from other lexemes, for example, by adding a derivational affix. It is a kind of word formation.

A derivational suffix usually applies to words of one syntactic category and changes them into words of another
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