Showing posts with label Linguists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linguists. Show all posts

Linguists views on the concept of Lexeme

I. Introduction

            As we know, nowadays, many linguists use the term 'word' less carefully, so Lyons proposes as follows,

            "However, since most linguists now employ the term 'word' to refer to such phonological or orthographical units such as /saen/ or 'sang' on the one hand, or to the grammatical units they represent, on the other hand, (and indeed do not always distinguish even between these two senses), we shall introduce another term, lexeme, to denote the more 'abstract' units which occur in different inflexional 'forms' according to the syntactic rules involved in the generation of sentences" (1968:197). So, the word or 'word' is distinguished from the word or 'lexeme'.