WORD VRESUS LEXEMES

WORD:
Word is the smallest element of a language that may be pronounced in isolation . It also refers to the
orthographic realization of the word . It is defined as ‘’one or more morphemes that can stand alone in a
language ‘’.

WORD AS AN UNINTERRUPTIBLE UNIT :

Word is an uninterruptible unit . When elements are added to a word to modify its meaning , they are
never included within that word .They respect the internal stability of the word and are added either at
the beginning as prefixes of the word or at the end as suffixes of the word.

e.g ‘’ action’’ and ‘’inaction’’ are the modified forms of the word ‘’act’’.

DIFFERENT MORPHOSYNTACTIC WORDS :

Words can take different shapes during use . These different forms are called the different
morphosyntactic forms of a word .

e.g : take , took , taken ( morphological conditioning )

go , went , gone ( suppletion )

THE BUILDING BRICK OF A LANGUAGE :

Words are the basic units of syntactic organization of a language. They can be put together to build
larger elements of a language.

e.g: A red rock (phrase)

I threw a red rock (clause)

I threw a red rock in the lake (sentence)

WORDS AND MORPHMES:

Words can be analyzed into meaningful elements which recur and combine according to rules. These
meaningful elements of words are called morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning.
Which will not necessarily stand on its own.
Free Morphemes
A word may consist of a single morpheme

e.g: rock, red, quick, run, go.

Bound Morphemes:
A word may consist of several morphemes,such words are called complex words.

e.g:rock-s ,run-ning, quick-ly, red-ness, go-es

A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes.

Compound Word:
A compound word consists of more than one root.

e.g: black-board, school-boy.

LEXEME
A lexeme is defined as the fundamental unit of the lexicon of a language .It is an abstract vocabulary
item which may be realized in different sets of grammatical variants .The head words in a dictionary are
all lexemes. They are also known as lexical units or lexical items .By convention lexemes are represented
by capital letters.

A lexeme taken as the headword for the representation of all its variants is called a lemma .

e.g: RUN - run , runs ,running , ran ,run

LEXEMES AND SYNTACTIC CATEGORY:

Lexeme is an abstract head term which is associated with syntactic category and a particular semantic
interpretation and its actual realization “a word form”.

The set of the inflectional variants of the lexeme constitutes the so-called paradigm .In many cases
lexemes are realized by more than just inflectional variants but include word forms associated with
word formation processes that constitute the word –family.

e.g: FLY (noun)

Like all lexemes FLY belongs to a particular syntactic category ,it has a certain meaning and in synthetic
languages it has a corresponding inflectional paradigm which lists its inflectional realizations.

FLY (verb)

Note that there is a second lexeme FLY which belongs to the category of verb , it also has a certain
meaning and its own inflectional paradigm too.

INFLECTIONAL PARADIGM INFLECTIONAL PARADIGM WORD FAMILY

FLY (noun) FLY (VERB)

Fly fly flyer

Fly’s flies flyable

Flies flying no –fly

Flies’ flew

Flown

LEXEMES HAVING NO PARADIGMS :

There are certain syntactic categories in which the lexemes have no inflectional paradigms i.e
preposition , adverb etc. It also makes no difference whether to write them as lexemes or as simple
word form.

e.g: OF or of

MULTI WORD LEXEMES :

Some lexemes consist of more than one word .They are called multiword lexemes.

e.g: put up with , kick the bucket ,face the music

A