Chapter 4: Lexemes

Chapter 4 (‘Lexemes’) presents a detailed discussion of the notion ‘lexeme’, a lexical abstraction allowing distinct word forms to be classified according to their shared lexical content and contrasting morphosyntactic content.  Lexemes are central to understanding the organization of a language’s lexicon, but cannot simply be identified with lexical entries.  A language’s lexemes are intuitively regarded as differing from one another in both content and form, but this, too, is an oversimplification.