Wiktionary

lexeme

See also:Lexeme,andlexème

English

edit
WOTD – 3 April 2007
EnglishWikipediahas an article on:
Wikipedia

Etymology

edit

FromLatinlexis,fromAncient Greekλέξις(léxis,“word”)+-eme,a suffix indicating a fundamental unit in some aspect oflinguisticstructure, on the model ofphoneme.

Pronunciation

edit
  • enPR:lĕkˈsēmˌ;IPA(key):/ˈlɛkˌsiːm/
  • Audio(US):(file)

Noun

edit
Examples (linguistics)
  • The family associated with the lexemerunincludes the forms "run" (lemma), "running" (aregularinflected form), and "ran" (anirregularinflected form). It excludes "runner" – which is a derived term, a different part of speech, and in turn the lemma of its own lexeme, which includes the plural, "runners".
  • The family for lexemesteam ironincludes "steam iron" (lemma) and "steam irons" (inflected form).

lexeme(plurallexemes)

  2. (linguistics)Alexicalitem corresponding to thesetof allwords(or of allmulti-word expressions) that aresemanticallyrelated throughinflectionof a particular sharedbasic form.
    2. (strictly)Theabstractminimumunit of languageor meaning thatunderliessuch a set.
      Synonyms:lexical item,semanteme
      • 2003,David Crystal,The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language,2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, page118:
        Alexemeis a unit of lexical meaning, which exists regardless of any inflectional endings it may have or the number of words it may contain. Thus,fibrillate,rain cats and dogs,andcome inare alllexemes,as areelephant,jog,cholesterol,happiness,put up with,face the music,and hundreds of thousands of other meaningful items in English.
      • 2014September 25, Rochelle Lieber, Pavol Stekauer, editors,The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology‎[1],page347:
        In a typical lexicalist approach (e.g. Koontz-Garboden 2006), the unmarkedlexemeis taken as lexically listed, even if its meaning (as it often does) includes templatic entailments, and the derivational morphology is taken to operate on the underived form to yield the derived form. This is the case not only morphologically, but also semantically.
    4. (loosely,metonymically)The set itself; a lexemic family.
    6. (loosely,metonymically)The word-form chosen torepresentsuch a set or family.
      Synonyms:base form,basic form,canonical form,citation form,dictionary form,headword,lemma
      • 2024,Geoffrey K. Pullum,The Truth About English Grammar,Polity Press,→ISBN,page17:
        For the second sense, where “word” means “item that should have its own dictionary entry,” lexicographers sometimes use the term “lemma,” but that has other meanings too, so among linguists the termlexemeis now standard, and I’ll use it. For the different forms or shapes that belong to alexemewe can use the termword-form.¶ And as a typographical convention, from now on I’ll always putlexemenames in bold italics with a capital letter. So I’ll say there is alexemecalledPamper[emphasis in original]. It’s the name of a small collection of word-forms with particular spellings – four of them:pamper,pampered,pampering,andpampers.I will always put word-forms (and all the phrases and clauses I mention as examples) in italics.
  3. (computing)An individual instance of a continuouscharactersequencewithout spaces, used inlexical analysis(seetoken).

Usage notes

edit
  • In linguistics, alexemeisstrictlyunderstood as corresponding to afamilyof inflected forms, not a particularmemberof its family, although it is alwaysdesignatedby one of the members (thelemma).
  • Since all the members of alexemefamily are related byinflection,each member is the samepart of speechand usually is built from the same number of words as each of the other members (e.g., "put up with" and "puts up with" each consist of three words, and both are classified asverbs).
  • For a lemma that has no inflected forms, the lexemic family consists of just a single member (e.g., thelexemebeyondcontains only the lemma "beyond", since Englishprepositionsare not inflected).

Holonyms

edit

Derived terms

edit
edit

Translations

edit

See also

edit

Further reading

edit

Romanian

edit

Noun

edit

lexemenpl

  1. pluraloflexem
Retrieved from "https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=lexeme&oldid=82615315"