ABSTRACT
Anything meaningful in a language is a linguistic expression. Linguistic expressions may be of various length. We recognize three units of meaning: morphemes (which may be less than a word), lexemes (roughly, words and idioms), and sentences. In this chapter we introduce a distinction between lexemes, which have semantic relations outside of language, and function words, which contribute grammatical meanings to utterances. A lexeme may consist of one or more meaningful units, called morphemes, and we discuss different kinds of morphemes. Every lexeme is a combination of form and meaning. Generally we can recognize three aspects of meaning in lexemes: the relation to phenomena outside language, the relation to people’s attitudes and feelings and the relation to other lexemes. Two lexemes that have the same form (pronunciation, spelling) are homonyms; a single lexeme with a wide range of meanings is polysemous; but it is not always easy to decide if apparently different meanings for one form represent a range of meanings belonging to a single lexeme or meanings of different lexemes, which are homonyms.
