Words and lexemes

Linguistics

1. WORDS AND LEXEMES (Morphology) level-5

2. What is word? In language, a word is the smallest element that may be pronounced in isolation. This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own . A word may consist of a single morpheme . For example: Rock - Red - Quick - Run - Go Or several morpheme . Rock s - Red ness - Quick ly - Run ning - Go es

3. A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes. Rock- s Run- ning Red- ness Go- es Quick- ly O r more than one root in a compound. Black- board Down- fall Words can be put together to build larger elements of language . Sentence He threw a rock near to the lake. Phrase A red rock Clause I threw a rock

4. Lexical word vs. grammatical word Word classes may be either open or closed. An  open class  is one that commonly accepts the addition of new words, while a  closed class  is one to which new items are very rarely added. Open classes normally contain large numbers of words, while closed classes are much smaller. Typical open classes found in English and many other languages are nouns, verbs (excluding auxiliary verbs, if these are regarded as a separate class), adjectives, adverbs and  interjections  are often an open class, though less familiar to English speakers, and are often open to nonce words. Typical closed classes are prepositions (or postpositions), determiners, conjunctions, and  pronouns .

5. A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. What is a Lexeme? For example: Run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN Find, finds, found, and finding are forms of the English lexeme FIND

6. The notion of a lexeme is very central to  morphology , and thus, many other notions can be defined in terms of it. 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.

7. Difference between Lexeme and Morpheme Lexeme refers to a single word and all of its forms . For example the word "go" in English has the forms "go" "goes" "went" and "going". All of these words are from the same lexeme "go .“ Morpheme refers to the smallest unit of meaning of a word can be broken down into. For example the word "cats" This can be broken down into "cat-s" "cat" carries the meaning of the furry four legged animal and "-s" carries the meaning of plural.

8. Lexicon v/s Mental lexicon Lexicon refers to the words used in a language or by a person or group of people. The  mental lexicon  is defined as a  mental  dictionary that contains information regarding a word's meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on. The mental lexicon is a construct used in linguistics and psycholinguistics to refer to individual speakers 'lexical , or word, representations.

9. The mental lexicon differs from the lexicon  because it is not just a general collection of words; instead, it deals with how those words are activated, stored, processed, and retrieved by each speaker. An individual’s mental lexicon changes and grows as new words are learned and is always developing.