Lexeme

Overview

A lexeme is the basic abstract unit of meaning in a language. It represents a family of related word forms that share a common lexical meaning. For example, the lexeme ‘go’ encompasses the inflected forms ‘goes’, ‘going’, and ‘went’. It’s the dictionary entry, the core concept.

Key Concepts

Lexemes are distinct from individual word forms (or inflections). While ‘run’, ‘runs’, ‘ran’, and ‘running’ are different word forms, they all belong to the single lexeme ‘run’. This abstract representation helps linguists organize and analyze vocabulary.

Deep Dive

Consider the lexeme ‘child’. This single lexeme corresponds to the word forms ‘child’ and its plural ‘children’. The relationship between a lexeme and its forms is often mediated by morphological rules. Lexemes can also be represented by idiomatic expressions, where the meaning isn’t directly predictable from the individual words.

Applications

The concept of lexemes is fundamental in various fields:

• Computational Linguistics: For natural language processing (NLP), parsing, and information retrieval.
• Lexicography: Dictionary creation relies heavily on identifying and defining lexemes.
• Morphology: Studying how word forms are derived from their base lexeme.

Challenges & Misconceptions

A common misconception is equating a lexeme with a single word. However, a lexeme is the abstract concept, not the concrete word form. Another challenge lies in identifying lexemes for languages with complex morphology or for words with multiple meanings (polysemy).

FAQs

What is the difference between a lexeme and a word? A lexeme is the abstract unit of meaning, while a word is a specific form or instance of that lexeme.

How are lexemes identified? Linguists identify lexemes by grouping together all inflected forms that share a common core meaning.