120 Hr. TEFL Course Module 2-Linguistics (Pt.8)

Module 2: Linguistics

Lexical items: Whereas a lexeme is the root of a word, a lexical item is the entirety of a word or phrase that imparts meaning. In our previous example, we mentioned that “snows,” “snowed,” and “snowing” all have the same lexeme, which is “snow.” In that example, all of those words are different lexical items. A lexical item can also be a combination of words, such as “class work,” or a phrase, such as “in the way.” Essentially, lexical items are the units in a sentence that have separate meaning.

Word forms: The term “word forms” encompasses all the iterations of a similar lexeme. In other words, some word forms of the lexeme “go” are “goes,” “went,” and “will go.” This term is used to describe the different conjugations of a verb, the different tenses of a word, or the different forms of a word based on amount.

Another important idea that would be helpful to know is that lexicology also encompasses lexical structure, which deals with the structure of words and their parts. Let’s take a closer look at lexical structure:

Lexical structure: Lexical structure refers to the internal structure of lexemes as well as the structure of the lexicon of a language. The “lexicon” is just a fancy term for all of the words in a group.

• Paradigms: Differences in meaning that rely on the substitution of words. In other words, if you look closely at a phrase, such as “Bill ran to his truck,” making a paradigmatic change would require a substitution. This would result in a different phrase, for example, “Bill ran to his wife” or “Frank ran to his truck.” These changes completely change the meaning of the sentence because different subjects and objects can be substituted. 

• Syntagms: These are differences that result from the positioning of words in a phrase. In other words, to make a syntagmatic change in a sentence, you would change the order of the words to adjust the meaning of the sentence. For example, if the sentence “Johnny threw the ball to Mary” is changed to “Mary threw the ball to Johnny,” then the difference is syntagmatic.