Oleh : Faizal Risdianto
I. Pendahuluan
Sebagaimana kita ketahui, dewasa ini banyak ahli linguistik memakai istilah ‘kata’ secara kurang cermat sehingga Lyons mengusulkan sebagai berikut,
“ 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).
Jadi, kata atau ‘word’ dibedakan dari kata atau ‘lexeme’.