Word, word-form and lexeme

Abstract

Different senses of the term ‘word’: words and lexemes; homonymy, syncretism, lexical homonymy; words and word-forms. Practical illustrations . Need to draw distinctions: in lexicography; in counting word frequency; in concordances; in study of collocations; in semantic theory. Lexical and inflectional morphology . Word-formation as lexeme formation; likewise compounding. Word-formation and compounding as branches of lexical morphology. Paradigms; inflectional morphology the study of paradigms. Categories: morphosyntactic categories; morphosyntactic categories vs morphosyntactic properties. The reader may have noticed that the term ‘word’ has been used in two, or perhaps three, different senses. We said, first of all, that the opening sentence of Yeats's poem: That is no country for old men was made up of seven words, and that each of these was made up of varying numbers of letters or phonemes. Likewise in a line of Latin poetry about a river: Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum ‘It glides past and will continue to glide past, rolling on for all time’ (Horace, Epistles , 1, 2. 43) we will distinguish a seven-letter word labitur ‘[it] glides’, a two-letter word et ‘and’, and so on. The ancient grammarians would already have analysed the line in this way, saying more precisely that labitur was built up of the three syllables la, bi and tur , and that it was these in turn which were built up of the letters l, a , etc. Similarly, the English word country could, in the first instance, be divided phonetically into the syllables [k∧n] and [trI], with stress on the first.