Talk:Lexeme

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Please give examples

I would highly appreciate example words and sentences. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pinbot (talk • contribs) 06:46, June 19, 2006

[Please see my note below. The whole thing needs a comprehensible re-write] John gave the book to Mary. The nouns and verb are lexemes. 'the' and 'to' are function words; they are semantically (although not entirely pragmatically ['the' references noun 'book' as some book that was previously introduced in the discourse as a new item preceded by 'a' or some other determiner] empty. JohndanR (talk) 19:01, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Lexemes and Lexicon

The article states: "A lexicon consists of lexemes." I think this is a different sense of 'lexeme' than the "abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics", mentioned at the top. So I think this should be explained. What is a lexicon here? Mental lexicon? A book? The inventory of all lexical morphemes (= "lexemes" in some theories)? -- Mumpitz 16:49, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

"Unusual" lexeme forms?

"Lemmas are used in dictionaries as the headwords, and other forms of a lexeme are often listed later in the entry if they are unusual in some way"

I don't think it's necessary for a lexeme form to be *unusual* to be listed later in the entry for a lexeme in a dicitonary. There's nothing unusual about alternate forms of a word. I'm taking this out for clarity, unless someone has an idea of something else this is supposed to mean, and clarifies it. Dr spork (talk) 17:03, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

"Run" example is not clear enough

Is the noun "run" considered a separate lexeme from the verb "run"? I don't know, so I have not edited the article. But I would like to know. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.25.215.113 (talk) 10:44, 30 August 2009 (UTC) According to 'the cambridge grammar of english', by carter and mccarthy; page 297. underlying forms are lexemes. the same word in two different classes would be different lexemes. for example, 'water' can be a noun or a verb. since a lexeme can only belong to one class [i assume from definition], the lexemes are different. However, waters, watering, watered would be distinct forms of the same lexeme, since they are all verbs.24.6.248.150 (talk) 18:14, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Lexeme vs. lexical item

From this article, one cannot tell how many meanings linguists ascribe to lexeme. It seems that lexical item includes compounds. Does lexeme sometimes mean lexical item and sometimes mean something like "non-compound word"? Or does lexeme always mean lexical item and if so, why are does lexical item have its own article? The article Compound (linguistics) begins with this sentence: "In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word) that consists of more than one stem." This implies that the correct definition of lexeme cannot exclude compounds, but this article should be rewritten to clarify whether lexeme always includes compounds, or only sometimes, and how lexeme differs from lexical item, if at all. Also, if the definition of lexeme is inconsistent with its usage at Compound (linguistics), that article needs attention also. Anomalocaris (talk) 00:08, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

The entire page appears to be entirely based on SIL references, and what is actually encompassed by the term 'lexeme' and 'lexical item' is obscured by language that could only be parsed by linguistic graduates who would understand what SIL's rather unhelpful definitions are driving at. What a lexeme actually is would be something in the noun, verb, adjective, class vs 'function' or 'grammatical' words: prepositions, conjunctions, etc. The former have semantic and cultural meaning, the latter mainly glue lexemes and other grammar-words together in a sentence/clause/phrase. It's not entirely that simple, but it's a rough approximation. JohndanR (talk) 18:50, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Suffix

The word "desinence" is defined in the Wictionary as a technical term from linguistics. The word "suffix" is the standard word used in United States of America in teaching school children. The Wikipedia page "Desinence" is in fact a redirect page to the Wikipedia article "Suffix". Suffix is 150 times more common in use than desinence, according to the books.google.com/ngrams word count of words in over 1,000,000 books. The Wikipedia style page instructs editors to avoid technical language in favor of standard English words. So I made this change. Nick Beeson (talk) 18:56, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Pure Synonyms

I was told that pure synonyms were considered to be apart of the same lexeme. For example, "couch" and "sofa" have the same lexical value, while the word "bank" has several lexical values, such as: a financial institution, a river bank, or a made shot in basketball that uses the backboard.

Is it accurate to say that "sofa" and "couch" are just different phonological forms of the same lexeme? Or is this wrong?

Possible circularity

Hello all. This article seems to define a "lexeme" as a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through "inflection". But the description section of this article explains the difference between inflection and derivation in terms of lexemes. This seems circular. I may be missing something though! Also, the article about inflection doesn't explain inflection very clearly, so it might be useful to add a short explanation of inflection to this article if the concept of inflection will be used in this article. JonathanHopeThisIsUnique (talk) 01:08, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 January 2024 and 8 May 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Nataliaelopez (article contribs).

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