Monday, November 22, 2021

Lexical Units Anyone?

Definitions for Common Linguistic Units

1) Phoneme: a minimal unit of sound; one might say that phonemes are primitive insofar as they're irreducible to other units. An example is b, I, t in the word, "bit." However, phonemes must not be confused with letters--they are more about variations in sound. See https://www.encyclopedia.com/science-and-technology/computers-and-electrical-engineering/computers-and-computing/phoneme

2) Morpheme: a minimal unit of meaning, and one may distinguish between free and bound morphemes. The word "unhappiness" has three morphemes: un, happi, ness. See https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100210358

3) Graphemes: a minimal unit of writing; also defined as
"a written symbol that is used to represent speech." Some writers stress the contrastive element of graphmes: see https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-grapheme-1690916

4) Lexemes: a fundamental and abstract lexical unit of a language. An example is the English lexeme, RUN, whose forms are run, runs, ran, and running. See https://dbpedia.org/page/Lexeme

5) Sememes: the fundamental unit of meaning that a morpheme bears. In the word, "doer," -er is the sememe; the pluralizing unit of meaning -s is another sememe (e.g., doers, writers, linguists).

7 comments:

Duncan said...

https://thelanguagenerds.com/2019/piraha-language-the-linguistic-anomaly/

Edgar Foster said...

Interesting article, Duncan, but please tell me how 1 language could overthrow Chomskyan universal grammar. It would take more than one anomalous language to establish linguistic relativity. That would be like one anomalous culture and its practices overthrowing moral absolutism, which sounds untrue to me.

My focus was not Chomskyan grammar anyway, but see https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/recursion-across-domains/selfembedded-recursive-postpositional-phrases-in-piraha-a-pilot-study/D941782655A2EE90FEB93C85B4DDA02E

Duncan said...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4550780/

Duncan said...

https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/80791/3/Gardiner_Shayna_201711_PhD_thesis.pdf

Edgar Foster said...

https://www.grsampson.net/VChCh.pdf

Duncan said...

This is why the data we have on the oldest dead languages is so useful.

Duncan said...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/