Lexical and grammatical meanings

The sentence has several kinds of grammatical meanings. Every language has a grammatical system and different languages have somewhat different grammatical systems. We can best explain what grammatical meanings are by showing how the sentence A dog barked differs from other sentences that have the same, or a similar, referring expression and the same predicate. The grammatical system of English makes possible the expression of meanings like these:

Statement vs question:

A dog barked.

Did a dog bark?

Affirmative vs negative:

A dog barked.

A dog did not bark.

No dog barked.

Past vs present:
A dog barked. A dog barks.

Singular vs plural:
A dog barked. Some dogs barked.

Indefinite vs definite:
A dog barked. The dog barked.

Grammatical meanings, then, are expressed in various ways: the arrangement of words (referring expression before the predicate, for instance), by grammatical affixes like the -s attached to the noun dog and the -ed attached to the verb bark, and by grammatical words, or function words, like the ones illustrated in these sentences: do (in the form did), not, a, some, and the.

Now let’s return to dog and bark. Their meanings are not grammatical but lexical, with associations outside language. They are lexemes. A lexeme is a minimal unit that can take part in referring or predicating. All the lexemes of a language constitute the lexicon of the language, and all the lexemes that you know make up your personal lexicon.

The term lexeme was proposed by Lyons (1977:18–25) to avoid complexities associated with the vague word ‘word.’ Consider these forms:

(a) go, going, went, gone
(b) put up with, kick the bucket, dog in the manger

How many words are there in group (a)? Four or one? There are four forms and the forms have four different meanings, but they have a shared meaning, which is lexical, and other meanings of a grammatical nature added to the lexical meaning. We say that these four forms constitute one lexeme—which, for convenience we designate as go.

Group (b) presents a different sort of problem. The expression put up with combines the forms of put and up and with, but its meaning is not the combination of their separate meanings. Therefore put up with, in the sense of ‘endure,’ ‘tolerate,’ is a single lexeme. The same must be true of kick the bucket meaning ‘die’ and dog in the manger when it refers to a person who will not let others share what he has, even though he does not use it himself.