LING 111 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Lexeme, Lexicology, Grammar
Document Summary
The key element of structure in any language is the word, the most important linguistic sign. The discipline that studies words and their characteristics, such as their nature, meaning, and origin, is called lexicology. The discipline that studies meaning in language, including word meaning, is called semantics. A word as a unit of linguistic structure is known as a lexeme. A lexeme carries a specific meaning, it can be used to produce new words, and it belongs to a particular word class (or part of speech). Depending on their syntactic functions, words in languages fall into different lexical classes. All the words in a language make its lexicon. All the words in the head of one native speaker of a language constitute the person"s mental lexicon. By the types of meaning they render, all lexemes can be divided into content and function lexemes. Content lexemes like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and participles have content meaning .
