Are "go" and "went" part of the same lexeme?

Question

Are “go” and “went” part of the same lexeme, i.e. the same set of inflected forms?

Consider this brief Glottopedia entry. The entry defines its subject matter as follows:

“A lexeme is usually defined as a set of inflected word-forms that differ only in their inflectional properties.”

The entry also provides these examples:

“The English word-forms boy and boys make up the lexeme BOY. The Latin word-forms habeo 'I have', habes 'you have', habet ' s/he has', habemus 'we have', habebam 'I had', habebunt 'they will have', and so on make up the lexeme HABERE.”

But can “went” really be described as part of a set of inflected word forms in the lexeme that also includes “go,” “goes,” and “going”? If so, how is “went” inflected?

Or am I confusing “inflections” with “inflectional properties”? (I don’t know whether there is a distinction between these terms or not). Could “went” have “inflectional properties” that make it part of the lexeme “GO” even if "went" can’t be described morphologically as being inflected?

Answer 1

Yes, they are. In the sentence John goes to school, goes can be replaced by went and the two sentences have the same meaning (semantic content) except for tense.

The base form is usually called lemma in formal and applied linguistics (in this case go) and it stands for the meaning of the inflected word.

Answer 2

Yes. Several frameworks consider words such as go/went or I/me to be two representations of a single lexical item. Suppletion is the term for when the inflected forms are etymologically unrelated, while the term allolex can be used for the individual forms.

(I think allolex originated in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage framework, originally only for semantic primes, but I can't see any reason why it can't be applied to any other words.)