The lexeme is one of those linguistic elements that grammarians get excited about but don’t mean much to writers. It’s simply a way of sorting words into categories, conjugating verbs, or creating derivatives, such as turning a verb lexeme into a noun, etc.
It’s a word you may come across when working with an editor or in doing your own research, and one you can toss aside as not really relevant to your writing.
You may also want to explore “Morphemes & Allomorphs” and/or “Hypernyms and More“.
Linguistics is…
…the systematic study of the nature, structure, and variation of language (of which grammar is a part), which describes how people use language. For the writer, how words are used (or spelled!) determines a character’s social and educational level and the time period for the story.
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| Lexeme | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Definition: The basic unit of meaning, i.e., any word with meaning, whether it’s voiced or written. It may be an individual word, an inflected variant, a chain of words, i.e., a catena (think phrasal verb), or a derivative, which performs a different grammatical function, e.g., a noun as opposed to the verb.
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| In the examples below, create, play, and work are lexemes and the verb conjugations are all inflected variants of the same lexeme — and all about the same action verb. When the base lexeme is turned into a noun, for example, they are derivatives.
When the lexeme, play for example, is combined with another word and has its own meaning, then it is a catena, i.e., play off, play on, etc.
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| The Homograph of a Lexeme | Rule: Just because a word is spelled the same, they don’t necessarily represent the same lexeme. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Catena | Definition: A chain of words that form a phrase that is different from their individual meanings, unlike morphemes.
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| I’ll try to make it up to you in the future.
Hands off that cake! He deserves to be put away forever. I’m blown away by his new poem. The recession may finally have blown itself out. She was tired and used up. |
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Satisfy your curiosity about other Grammar Explanations or explore the Properly Punctuated, Word Confusions, and/or Formatting Tips.
Resources for Lexemes
Catena (linguistics).” Wikipedia. 18 February 2019. Accessed 8 April 2019. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catena_(linguistics)>.
Khullar, Payal. “What does the term lexeme mean? What are some examples of lexeme?.” eNotes. 27 January 2016. Retrieved 22 March 2019. <https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-term-lexeme-mean-what-examples-331884>
mimerajver “What does the term lexeme mean? What are some examples of lexeme?.” eNotes. 27 January 2016. Retrieved 22 March 2019. <https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-term-lexeme-mean-what-examples-331884>
Pinterest Photo Credits:
Olympic Road Race Women’s Winners, London, July 2012, by David Iliff is under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons.
