Lexemes word forms and grammatical words

We intuitively know what a WORD is. In written language words are separated by spaces. In spoken language you can sometimes hear a pause between them, although in most cases there’s nothing noticeable that separates words in spoken language.

We can distinguish the orthographic word, the grammatical word and the lexeme.

An ORTHOGRAPHIC WORD is a word form separated by spaces from other orthographic words in written texts and the corresponding form in spoken language.

In the example:

She wanted to win the game.

there are six orthographic words: she, wanted, to, win, the and game.

A GRAMMATICAL WORD is a word form used for a specific grammatical purpose.

For example in the sentence:

That man over there said that he would like to talk to you.

we have the word THAT used twice. This is one orthographic word, but we’re dealing with two grammatical words here: the first THAT is a demonstrative adjective and the other THAT is a conjunction.

A LEXEME is a group of word forms with the same basic meaning that belong to the same word class.

For example the words AM, WAS, IS belong to one lexeme, as they have the same basic meaning and are all verbs. Also the words COME and CAME belong to the same lexeme.

How do they relate to one another?

In many cases orthographic and grammatical words overlap. For example in the sentence:

They bought the house.

there are four orthographic words and four grammatical words, so there is one-to-one correspondence in this case.

But if we slightly modify the sentence like so:

They didn’t buy the house.

there are now five orthographic words and six grammatical words. This is because the orthographic word DIDN’T represents a sequence of two grammatical words: DID + NOT.

It may also be the other way around. In the sentence:

I kind of like it.

there are five orthographic words, but only four grammatical words, because the two orthographic words KIND OF actually represent a single grammatical word.

You can also watch the video version here:

Besides
the term ‘word’ there exists a scientific term lexeme.
This term emerged from the necessity to differentiate a word-form and
the word as a structural element of the language. Thus in the
sentence My
friend has got a lot of books and I borrowed an interesting book
from him the
words
books and
book
are perceived as two words but actually these are the grammatical
variants of one lexeme. The term lexeme was introduced to avoid such
kind of ambiguity. Besides it is in line with the terms of units of
other levels: phoneme, morpheme, phraseme.

Lexeme
is a structural element of the language, word in all its meanings and
forms (variants). Lexeme is an
invariant
(from Lat. invarians
‘unchangeable’),
i.e. “the common property inherent in classes of relatively
homogeneous classes of objects and phenomena” (Сoлнцев, p.
214). This common property is realized in all the variants of a
lexeme’s use in actual speech.

When
used in actual speech the word undergoes certain modifications and
functions in one of its grammatical forms, e.g.
singer, singer’s, singers, singers’ (He is a good singer. I like
the singer’s voice,
etc.) or
to take, takes, took, took, taking.
Grammatical forms of words are called word-forms, or grammatical
variants of
words. In the above example these are variants of the lexemes
singer and
take.
The system showing a word in all its word-forms is called its
paradigm.
The lexical meaning of the word remains unchanged throughout its
paradigm. All the word-forms are lexically identical but they differ
in their grammatical meanings. Actually in each particular context we
deal with particular grammatical variants of lexemes.

Besides
paradigms of particular words, such as boy,
boy’s, boys, boys’
there is an abstract notion of paradigms of parts of speech. For
instance, the paradigm of the noun is ( ), (-’s), (-s), (-s’),
the paradigm of the verb is ( ), -s, -ed, -ed, -ing. The sign ( )
stands for a zero morpheme, i.e. its meaningful absence.

Besides
the grammatical forms (variants) of words, lexical varieties of the
word are distinguished, which are called lexico-semantic
variants (LSVs).
The overwhelming majority of English words are polysemantic, i.e.
they have more than one meaning but in actual speech a word is used
in one of its meanings. Such a word used in oral or written speech in
one of its meanings is called a lexico-semantic variant.

E.g.
to
call —
1) say in a loud voice: She
called for help,
2) pay a short visit: I
called on Mr. Green,
3) name: We
call him Dick,
4) consider, regard as: I
call that shame,
5) summon, send a message to: Please
call a doctor.
The verb
to call is
presented here by five LSVs.

Many
lexemes have more than one variants of pronunciation. They are
phonetic variants of lexemes. Phonetic
variants are
different ways of pronouncing certain lexemes, e.g. again
[ə`gein,
ə`gen], interesting
[`intristiŋ,
intə`restiŋ], often
[`o:fn,
`ofn, `ofən, `oftən], etc. There are also graphical
variants,
i.e. different ways of spelling one and the same lexeme:
inquire/enquire.

To
morphological
variants belong
the cases of certain differences in the morphological composition of
words not accompanied by differences in meaning. These are the cases
of the two variants of the Past Indefinite tense: to
learn – learnt, learned, to leap – leapt, leaped; to spoil –
spoilt, spoiled; to dream – dreamt, dreamed, to broadcast
– broadcast,
broadcasted,
etc. Also to morphological variants belong parallel formations like:
phonetic
– phonetical, geologic – geological,
etc. Phonetic and morphological variants are modifications of the
same lexeme as the change in the composition of a word is not
followed by a change in meaning. In case of different meanings we
deal with different lexemes. Compare for instance economic
‘экономический‘
and
economical
‘экономный’
which
are different lexemes.

Thus,
within the language system the word or lexeme exists as a system and
unity of all its forms and variants. It is an invariant
–
the structural unit of the language.

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Presentation on theme: «THE LEXEME WORD-FORM GRAMMATICAL WORD MORPHEME MORPH ALLOMORPH»— Presentation transcript:

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THE LEXEME WORD-FORM GRAMMATICAL WORD MORPHEME MORPH ALLOMORPH
WHAT IS WORD? THE LEXEME WORD-FORM GRAMMATICAL WORD MORPHEME MORPH ALLOMORPH

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WHAT IS WORD? Term used intuitively in everyday language for a basic element of language. a single unit of language which has meaning and can be spoken or written.

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(a) phonetic-phonological level: words are the smallest segments of sound that can be theoretically isolated by word accent and boundary markers like pauses, clicks. morphological level, words are characterized as the basic elements of grammatical paradigms like inflection and are distinguished from the morphologically characterized word forms, cf. write vs writes, wrote, written;

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The lexeme What are you going to do when you were reading a book and you found the word “exhausted” for the first time? e.g “ I saw that man was so exhausted”. Look up dictionary and check “exhaust”. This basic base of abstrack vocabulary item iscalled “lexeme”.

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WORD-FORM The word see, sees, seeing, saw and seen as five different words which come from the same lexeme.

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Grammatical Word Noun Adjective Verb Tense Gender Number

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Morpheme Morphology is the sudy of word structure. It can be seen that many words are morphologicallly simple. E.g  the, book, she, desk, eat, boot.etc The term morpheme is used to refer the smallest, indivisble unit which words are made up.

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Morph A morph is a physical form representing some morpheme in a language. I parked the car. She parks the car. We park the car. The past tense of regular verb in English spelled –ed, has different in sound /id/, /d/, /t/. It named different morph with same morpheme. When they grouped together, it is allomorph.

This word park is a lexeme that might be confused with another lexeme; its homonym park.

This study provides relatively detailed descriptions of inflectional morphology in the Oromo language. It identifies occurrence patterns of morphemes and draws rules for inflections in the language. Although it focuses basically on inflectional morphology, it, in some ways, deals with derivational processes and syntactic structures for comparison and relational analysis. A degree of fusion of morphs and morphological occurrences of inflectional formatives have been thoroughly dealt with. The thesis describes the inflectional forms of, essentially, nouns and verbs. However, words occurring in the subject position (nominals) and verb-related words occurring in the predicate position have also been examined. Since the two word classes (nouns and verbs) are mostly the ones that undergo inflection, they determine the inflectional characteristics of the language. The thesis consists of five chapters which are concerned, respectively, with: introduction in which preliminaries and methodology are treated, literature review which deals with some related concepts and previous works on Oromo, nominal inflection (including nouns, pronouns and adjectives), verb inflection (including verbs and adverbs) and conclusion. Number, singulative, gender and case are considered in the nominal inflection. Verb inflection is described in terms of inherent and agreement properties of grammatical function. In the descriptive chapters, distribution of morphemes and their allomorphs, along with their hosts, have been examined. This thesis provides a relatively more comprehensive and detailed description of inflectional morphology in Oromo, and hence the research outcomes are more focused to forms and functions of inflections.

In linguistics, a lexeme is the fundamental unit of the lexicon (or word stock) of a language. Also known as a lexical unit, lexical item, or lexical word. In corpus linguistics, lexemes are commonly referred to as lemmas.

A lexeme is often—but not always—an individual word (a simple lexeme or dictionary word, as it’s sometimes called). A single dictionary word (for example, talk) may have a number of inflectional forms or grammatical variants (in this example, talks, talked, talking).

A multiword (or composite) lexeme is a lexeme made up of more than one orthographic word, such as a phrasal verb (e.g., speak up; pull through), an open compound (fire engine; couch potato), or an idiom (throw in the towel; give up the ghost).

The way in which a lexeme can be used in a sentence is determined by its word class or grammatical category.

Etymology

From the Greek, «word, speech»

Examples and Observations

• «A lexeme is 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, and come in are all lexemes, as are elephant, jog, cholesterol, happiness, put up with, face the music, and hundreds of thousands of other meaningful items in English. The headwords in a dictionary are all lexemes.»
  (David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Specifications of Lexemes

«[A] lexeme is a linguistic item defined by the following specifications, which make up what is called the lexical entry for this item:

• its sound form and its spelling (for languages with a written standard);
• the grammatical category of the lexeme (noun, intransitive verb, adjective, etc.);
• its inherent grammatical properties (for some languages, e.g. gender);
• the set of grammatical forms it may take, in particular, irregular forms;
• its lexical meaning.
• «These specifications apply to both simple and composite lexemes.»
  (Sebastian Löbner, Understanding Semantics. Routledge, 2013)

The Meanings of Lexemes

«Definitions are an attempt to characterize the ‘meaning’ or sense of a lexeme and to distinguish the meaning of the lexeme concerned from the meanings of other lexemes in the same semantic field, for example, the ‘elephant’ from other large mammals. There is a sense in which a definition characterizes the ‘potential’ meaning of a lexeme; the meaning only becomes precise as it is actualized in a context. Since the division of the meaning of a lexeme into senses is based on the variation of meaning perceived in different contexts, a tension exists in lexicography between the recognition of separate senses and the potentiality of meaning found in definitions. This may well account in large part for the divergence between similar-sized dictionaries in the number of senses recorded and in consequent differences of definition.»
(Howard Jackson and ‎Etienne Zé Amvela, Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology, 2nd ed. Continuum, 2005)

Invariable and Variable Lexemes

«In many cases, it makes no difference whether we take a syntactic or a lexical perspective. Lexemes such as the and and are invariable, i.e., there is only one word corresponding to each. Also invariable are lexemes like efficiently: although more efficiently is in some respects like harder, it is not a single word, but a sequence of two, and hence efficiently and more efficiently are not forms of a single lexeme. Variable lexemes, by contrast, are those which have two or more forms. Where we need to make clear that we are considering an item as a lexeme, not a word, we will represent it in bold italics. Hard, for example, represents the lexeme which has hard and harder—and also hardest—as its forms. Similarly are and is, along with be, been, being, etc., are forms of the lexeme be. . . . A variable lexeme is thus a word-sized lexical item considered in abstraction from grammatical properties that vary depending on the syntactic construction in which it appears.»
(Rodney Huddleston and Geoffroy Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Pronunciation: LECK-seem