Blackwell Reference Online

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P hilosophy of language A word may have different inflections and may be presented in different forms depending on its position in a sentence. But there must be a basic core that determines that all the various forms are the forms of the same word. This basic core is called a lexeme. For instance, “builds,” “building,” “built” are all particular inflectional variants of the verb “to build.” “To build” is the lexeme. Precisely speaking, meaning is ascribed to a lexeme rather than to a word. Hence, it is more proper to speak of lexical meaning than of word meaning. “Within semantics, the notion of word that is most useful is that of the lexeme which is an abstract grammatical construct that underlies a set of word forms which are recognised as representatives of ‘the same word’ in different syntactic environments.” Cann, Formal Semantics ... log in or subscribe to read full text