Lexemes
To linguists and non-linguists alike, the word is the most basic and obvious unit of language. But in many languages, units which we would want to recognize as a single word can appear in many different morphological forms. Thus, in English, go, goes, went, have gone and to go are all forms of the verb to go. Other languages have many more morphological variants of a single word-form. In Ancient Greek, for example, a single verb, tithe-mi, which means ‘put’, has several hundred different forms, which convey differences of person, number, tense and mood, such as e-the--ka ‘I put’, tithei-e-te-n ‘you two might put’, tho--men ‘let us put’, etc. But these different forms only alter some aspects of the meaning of the word. Both go and tithe-mi share a large component of meaning between their different forms: tithe-mi always has the sense ‘put’, and the forms of the verb to go always have the sense ‘go’, regardless of whether the sentence in question is ‘I went’ or ‘you have gone’. For this reason, a semantic description does not need to treat all the variant morphological forms of a single word separately. The lexeme is the name of the abstract unit which unites all the morphological variants of a single word. Thus, we can say that go, goes, went, have gone and to go all are instantiations of the lexeme to go, and e-the--ka, tithei-e-te-n and tho--men are all instantiations of the lexeme tithe-mi. We usually refer to the lexeme as a whole using one of the morphological variants, the citation form. This differs from language to language: for verbs, for example, English, French and German all use the infinitive as the citation form (to go, aller, gehen), whereas Warlpiri uses the non-past form of the verb (paka-rni ‘hitting’, yi-nyi ‘giving’).
Not all languages have a word for ‘word’
Not all languages have a word corresponding to English ‘word’: Warlpiri, again, makes no distinction between ‘word’, ‘utterance’, ‘language’ and ‘story’, all of which are translated by the noun yimi. In Cup’ik (Yup’ik, Central Alaska), the word for ‘word’ also means ‘sayings, message’ and ‘Bible’ (Woodbury 2002: 81). Dhegihan (Siouan, North America) has a single word, íe, referring to words, sentences and messages (Rankin et al. 2002).
