Lexeme

Lexeme is a fundamental unit in linguistics, specifically in the study of morphology. It is the abstract representation of a word, independent of its grammatical inflections or phonetic variations. A lexeme can give rise to multiple forms through inflection. For example, the lexeme RUN can give rise to forms such as "runs", "running", "ran", etc.

Definition

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, "run", "runs", "ran", and "running" are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN.

Lexeme vs. Word

A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, identical to a word. The difference is that the concept of lexeme includes all inflectional forms, as they are considered variations on a single unit. A related concept is the lemma, which is a particular form of a lexeme that is chosen by convention to represent a canonical form of a lexeme. Lemmas are used in dictionaries as the headword by which a particular lexeme is indexed.

Lexical Entry

A lexical entry is a set of forms that a lexeme can take, together with the information related to them. This information can include the meaning of the lexeme, its syntactic properties, and other data. The lexical entry is a theoretical construct that defines a lexeme in terms of its morphological, phonological, syntactic, and semantic properties.

See Also

• Morpheme
• Word
• Lemma (morphology)
• Morphology (linguistics)