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A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language. David Crystal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. p. 118. . a emic unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single root word. For example, in English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, which can be represented as RUN.
One form, the lemma (or citation form), is chosen by convention as the canonical form of a lexeme. The lemma is the form used in dictionaries as an entry's headword. Other forms of a lexeme are often listed later in the entry if they are uncommon or irregularly inflected.
A lexeme belongs to a particular syntactic category, has a certain meaning (Semantics), and in inflecting languages, has a corresponding Inflection. That is, a lexeme in many languages will have many different forms. For example, the lexeme RUN has a present third person singular form runs, a present non-third-person singular form run (which also functions as the past participle and Non-finite verb form), a past form ran, and a present participle running. (It does not include runner, runners, runnable etc.) The use of the forms of a lexeme is governed by rules of grammar. In the case of English verbs such as RUN, they include subject–verb agreement and compound tense rules, which determine the form of a verb that can be used in a given sentence.
In many formal theories of language, lexemes have subcategorization frames to account for the number and types of complements. They occur within sentences and other syntax.
The compound root morpheme + derivational morphemes is often called the stem. The decomposition stem + can then be used to study inflection.
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