Lexeme

A lexeme (/ˈlɛksiːm/ ^ⓘ) is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning,^[1] a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single root word. For example, in English, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, which can be represented as RUN.^{[note 1]}

One form, the

Description

The notion of the lexeme is central to morphology,^[2] the basis for defining other concepts in that field. 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.

A lexeme belongs to a particular

A language's lexemes are often composed of smaller units with individual meaning called morphemes, according to root morpheme + derivational morphemes + affix (not necessarily in that 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 to smaller constituents.^[3]
• The derivational morphemes carry only derivational information.^[4]
• The affix is composed of all inflectional morphemes, and carries only inflectional information.^[5]

The compound root morpheme + derivational morphemes is often called the

• Ending (linguistics)
• Inflection
• Lemma
• Lexical word vs. grammatical word
• Marker (linguistics)
• Multiword expression
• Null morpheme
• Root (linguistics)
• Stem
• Syntagma (linguistics)
• Word family

Notes

References