10
votes
Does lexeme and stem mean the same?
A "lexeme" is a theoretical thing, a unit in the mental lexicon. You can think of it as being an entire dictionary entry, but in our mental knowledge bank of what words mean rather than a ...
- 50.9k
10
votes
Wordplay in ancient texts
Aristophanes (Knights 21–26), much earlier than the Philogelos, punned on repeating molōmen auto, molōmen auto "let us go, that" ending up sounding like the taboo automolōmen "let us desert".
...
- 3,204
5
votes
Accepted
Are 'yesterday' and 'now' forms of the same lexeme?
In English, only verbs have a past tense but the other parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, ...) don't have one. The fact that you can express a notion of past-ness for some of them (e.g., ...
- 25.7k
5
votes
Are 'yesterday' and 'now' forms of the same lexeme?
Now can be analysed as a pro-preposition, a word standing in for a prepositional phrase. It isn't verbal, so the category of tense doesn't apply to it.
Now and yesterday are not parallel terms. ...
- 5,416
5
votes
Accepted
Is a word form defined solely by its grapheme sequence? Can two lexemes have a shared word form?
First of all, words (and therefore word forms) are not made of graphemes. They're made of phonemes; either the kind of phoneme spoken as sound (as in English) or the kind of phoneme gestured with the ...
- 4,925
3
votes
Does lexeme and stem mean the same?
From the computational linguistics point of view, and especially targeting moderately inflected languages, a lexeme can be thought as a set of all inflected forms of a word. Such a set - a lexeme - ...
- 241
3
votes
Wordplay in ancient texts
One piece of ancient wordplay is the statement attributed to the oracle at Dodona:
Ibis redibis nunquam per bella peribis
which, depending on how you group the words, can be taken to bear either of ...
- 572
3
votes
Wordplay in ancient texts
I believe the first recorded occurrence of a pun in written text was around 2100 BC, in the language of the Sumerians.
In the epic of Gilgamesh when Utnapishtim warns the ruler of his city about the ...
- 131
2
votes
Are 'feminism' and 'feminist' part of the same lexeme, or two different lexemes?
If "feminist" and "feminism" are different forms of the same word, one might expect the following to be interpretable and acceptable English:
I support feminism, but I wouldn't want to be one.
...
- 12.3k
2
votes
Wordplay in ancient texts
This is purely a fun/informative answer based on the question title, since you've already got an answer (from an older text), and the nature of the wordplay below doesn't involve ambiguous syntactic ...
- 2,208
2
votes
Is there a term for a sequence of letters which can be divided into words in multiple ways?
I think that's called oronym.
In recreational linguistics, an oronym is a pair of phrases which are homophonic. When pronounced without a pause between words (internal open juncture), phrases which ...
- 1,369
1
vote
Is a word form defined solely by its grapheme sequence? Can two lexemes have a shared word form?
It can definitely happen. I have not example from English ready, but the Latin word form laudes can belong to two different lexemes: It can be the second person singular present tense subjunctive of ...
- 25.7k
1
vote
Accepted
Is each definition of a word a separate lexeme?
After looking around more on Wikipedia, the answer appears to be:
If the same sequence of graphemes can serve as different parts of speech (e.g. the noun 'run' vs. the verb 'run'), those are separate ...
- 143
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible