Sentence examples for lexeme from inspiring English sources
The word "lexeme" is correct and usable in written English
It is a linguistic term that refers to "a minimal meaningful unit of language." For example, the sentence "The cat chased the mouse" contains four lexemes: "the", "cat", "chase", and "mouse".
noun
A unit of lexical meaning, roughly corresponding to the set of inflected forms taken by a single word, so for example the lexeme RUN includes as members "run" (lemma), "running" (inflected form), and "ran", but excludes "runner" (a derived term).
For example, the word form "hated" realizes (on the morphemic stratum) a combination of two lexons, one of which, the stem, realizes the lexeme HATE and the other, the suffix, realizes the PAST TENSE lexeme; each of these two lexons is realized on the stratum below by a morpheme.
UNDER and STAND jointly realize the single lexeme UNDERSTAND (whose meaning cannot be described as a function of the meanings of UNDER and STAND), whereas the single PAST morpheme directly realizes the single lexeme PAST TENSE.
Sememes are roughly equivalent to what other linguists have called semantic components or features and include such aspects of the meaning of the lexeme "man" as "male," "adult," "human," and so forth.
The stratificational framework, presented in Lamb's work, consistently separates compositional and realizational units, the former being designated by terms ending in the suffix -on (semon, lexon, morphon, phonon), the latter by terms ending in the suffix -eme (sememe, lexeme, morpheme, phoneme).
These people are known as "onomasticians", and they trade in "non-paternal transmissions resulting from non-paternity events, charactonyms, isonomy, brick walls, daughtering out, lexeme retrieval, [and] uxorilocality".
In Collins English Dictionary I reckon it's lexeme - a minimal meaningful unit of language.
Similarly, the units of lexical analysis, sometimes referred to as lexemes (in one sense of this term), are not necessarily identifiable as single grammatical units, whether as morphemes, words, or phrases.
Ons are components or compounds of emes on the same stratum (semons are components of sememes, lexons are composed of lexemes, etc.) and emes realize ons of the stratum above (phonemes realize morphons, morphemes realize lexons, etc.).
Another example brings out more clearly the difference between morphemes (the minimal grammatical elements) and lexemes (the minimal meaningful elements).
Sticking strictly to lexemes, or minimal meaningful units of language, Anthony C. Woodbury has catalogued about fifteen distinct snow words in one Eskimo language, Central Alaskan Yupik roughly the same number as there are in English.
For example, the supposedly deep linguistic universal of 'recursion' (Hauser et al. 2002) is surely quite independent of whether the inventory of colour-name lexemes in your language influences the speed with which you can discriminate between color chips.
