Lexeme / Word and Wordform - explanation

 Lexeme / Word and Wordform - explanation

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" The basic lexical form found in a dictionary is here called "Lexeme" or "Word". The different inflected forms of a lexeme/word are called "Wordforms". The different wordforms of a lexeme/word belong to a same grammatical category and form its paradigm. Their lexical meaning is same. For example, the different inflected wordforms "go, goes, went, gone, going, to go" form a paradigm for the word "go".

Though the basic lexical meaning of the different wordforms belonging to a paradigm is similar, their syntactic distribution / positions are different. The inflectionally variant forms of the same lexeme do not, in general, have the same distribution; and that is the why Syntax and Inflection are complementary parts of grammar. For example, the wordform "goes" cannot occur in the syntactic position where the wordform "gone" occurs.

He has gone

*He has goes.

However, the lexical meanings of both wordforms are same.

The different wordforms of a Word or Lexeme are inflected for different inflectional / grammatical properties.

go - inflected for present tense

goes - inflected for 3rd Person Singular and Present tense

went - inflected for Past tense

gone - inflected for Past Participle

going - inflected for Present Participle

to go - inflected for Infinitive Participle

( Umadevi, K. " English Equivalence for Tamil Inflection ( A Transfer Module in Tamil - English Machine Translation system)" , Ph.D., dissertation submitted to the University of Madras, 2014, , p.44. )